Archive for MacBook-Pro tag

MacBook Pro 256GB SSD upgrade experience

April 9th 2010 • Apple, Hardware (crucial, mac, MacBook, MacBook-Pro, ssd) • 14,087 views • 16 responses

I’ve been wanting an SSD for some time and last week I caved. Armed with credit card, screwdriver and trusty MacBook Pro I fitted a sweet SSD and decided to document the experience.

Choosing a drive

There are a bewildering number of options out there. Budget, as always, dictates the combination of speed and size available.

Size

You may not need as much space as you think so even if you intend on a fresh install clean-up your current drive to get an idea of requirements.

Remembering to backup before:

1. Identify biggest culprits
   Try DaisyDisk ($19) or Disk Inventory X (free) and drill down to catch unexpected bloat in your music library, videos etc.
2. Clean up unused system junk
   Use CleanMyMac ($30) or MonoLingual (free) to clean up logs as well as redundant processor and language support.
3. Archive unused content
   Move those podcasts, TV shows, applications and games you aren’t going to use again to cheap external drives.
4. Deal with orphaned & duplicate files
   Find media in your iTunes folders missing from iTunes lists and either trash or add it back then use iTune’s Display Duplicates.

If you’re prepared to sacrifice your DVD drive then you can move your existing hard drive to the optical bay via an adaptor and purchase a smaller SSD for the OS and key performance-critical files. This saves cash and gives you more space but will cost you battery life.

Speed

SSDs are not created equal and the combination of flash and controller (on drive and in your machine) play a part in defining performance. Firmware, hardware revisions, drive size and operating system can also affect the speed so do your homework.

Anandtech have in-depth coverage of SSD’s including an SSD Bench with Tom’s providing a more general SSD Buyer’s Guide. Drives come and go quickly so keep an eye on review dates and exact model numbers as manufacturers have models with similar names with difference specifications.

My choice – lightning giant

I settled on the Crucial RealSSD C300 (CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1) because of it’s blazingly fast 256GB configuration and my storage requirements were still around 150GB.

This combination doesn’t come cheap at $699 USD. My links to the Crucial web site include my affiliate code ever optimistic I’ll get a small commission on a drive or two. (I dream that one day my blog will cover it’s own hosting charges)

Some other popular alternatives

• Intel’s X-25M G2 is well regarded and can be had for around $430 for 160GB and $210 for 80GB
• Intel’s X-25V (for value) can be had for around $120 for 40GB

Installing my SSD & Mac OS X (without a DVD drive)

The newer Unibody MacBook Pro’s hard-drives are designed to be user-replaceable and are covered in the manual.

My non-Unibody is not however those nice chaps over at iFixit have put together a hard drive replacement guide for 15” that is close enough but I have one complication. My DVD drive died which raised the question (and subsequent section)

How do I install Snow Leopard without a DVD drive?

Remote Install

Remote Install let’s you put the a DVD into a machine with a drive, run Utilities > Remote Install and follow a few steps which include holding down the alt key on the machine that doesn’t have a drive.

Unfortunately the machine wanting to boot has to be a Mac mini or a MacBook Air from 2009 or later – i.e. something Apple shipped without a DVD drive.

NetBoot

Mac’s can boot from network images however there are also obstacles here:

1. Apple’s official Netboot server is part of Mac OS X Server and that costs $499
2. The only unofficial server-less guide I could find is out of date  (nicl & NetInfo were deprecated in Leopard)

You will also need to create an image of the Mac OS X DVD to be able to install from.

USB image

Your USB device will require over 6.2GB to fit the image of Snow Leopard and need to be partitioned with GUID Partition Table which will wipe it. My 4GB memory stick was too small and I didn’t want to wipe my 1TB external drive so ended up using my 8GB Compact Flash card.

To get the Snow Leopard DVD copied to it:

1. Use a Mac that has a DVD drive and insert both the install DVD and USB storage device
2. Launch Disk Utility from the Utilities folder
3. Select the USB storage device from the list of devices and then choose the Partition tab
4. Choose 1 Partition from the Volume Scheme drop-down
5. Press Options… choose GUID Partition Table then OK
6. Press Apply to confirm you are happy to wipe away all the data on the device
7. Select the install DVD from the list of devices and then choose the Restore tab
8. Drag the install DVD from the list of devices into the Source text box
9. Drag the USB storage device from the list of devices into the Destination text box
10. Press the Restore and wait a while

When finished eject the USB device and insert it into your DVD-less Mac. Turn it on holding down alt until a boot selection screen shows and use the arrow keys and return to launch the installer from your USB device.

It may take a while for the installer screen to appear but be patient.

Press Options… from the installer to turn all off all the features you don’t need such as additional languages, printer drivers etc.

Performance over time & TRIM

A simplified primer

SSDs are fast but the flash technology suffers some limitations most importantly they can’t overwrite data without erasing it first.

In order to avoid this performance hit, and to preserve the life of the drive itself as blocks can be erased a fine number of times, SSD drives use fresh blocks for as long as they are available. Once they run out every write has to take the hit of an erase and performance can drop to traditional hard-drive speeds (or worse).

The problem arises sooner than you think because file-systems when deleting a file do not actually cause an erase but rather just de-allocate the block knowing it will get overwritten when it’s next needed so these fresh blocks decrease over time even if you drive never gets full. (Which is how file-recovery tools are able to undelete files)

This doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that when erasing a file in an operating system the file system just removes the block from it’s own list to be reused later and therefore the drive itself has no knowledge that the block can be erased until it runs out and starts honoring overwrites.

The solution

Manufacturers initially solved this problem by writing tools (for Windows) that examined the file-system structures to find out which blocks are unused so they can send ‘erase block’ commands down to the SSD drive and get your performance back – at least until you run out of blocks again.

This wasn’t a great solution so they agreed on a standard called ‘TRIM’ that lets file-systems tell the drive when blocks are no longer and can be erased in background on-demand. Support was built into Windows 7 and Linux 2.6.28 making a lot of SSD owners very happy.

Mac OS X & TRIM

Mac OS X doesn’t yet support the TRIM command although one Apple engineer confirmed they are looking at it back in October. They’re in no hurry as the SSD drives Apple ship don’t support TRIM yet.

In the mean time you might want to minimize unnecessary writes:

1. Don’t use Finder’s Secure Empty Trash or the srm command line tool – the overwriting they did on magnetic drives doesn’t overwrite on SSD but steals up to 35x the blocks of the original!
2. Keep large churning files on external drives (e.g. video processing)
3. Don’t let your laptop run out of power as it copies the RAM to disk each time (2-8GB)
4. Prevent unnecessary disk operations such as the ‘last accessed’ attribute on files (see below)
5. Don’t keep running disk benchmarks that cause lots of writes!

Turn off last-access-time

These access times are pretty useless and indeed the iPhone also has them switched off. Create a file named noatime.plist in your /Library/LaunchDaemons path with the following contents:

<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>noatime</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>mount</string>
      <string>-vuwo</string>
      <string>noatime</string>
      <string>/</string>
    </array>
    <key>RunAtLoad</key>
    <true/>
  </dict>
</plist>

Thanks go to Ricardo Gameiro for that tip although his other Mac SSD tweaks of creating a RAM disk is questionable given the way Mac OS X manages memory and disabling the RAM copy-to-disk entirely and therefore losing data is more risky to me than running out of blocks early.

Do not

• Turn off the sudden motion sensor – SSDs ignore the park head command anyway
• Turn off HFS+ journaling – some users report odd issues and corruption

Last resort

If you do get into the situation where your write performance is suffering badly and you are prepared to spend a little time to get it back you can do the following:

1. Ensure you have a full Time Machine backup
2. Boot from a Linux Live CD containing a recent build of hdparm
3. Use hdparm to perform an ATA Secure Erase
4. Boot from your Mac OS X DVD/USB stick
5. Choose the Utilities > Restore System From Backup menu option
6. Point it at your Time Machine backup

You should also be able to do this with other full-system backup tools like SuperDuper but you’ll have to figure out the steps for yourself ;-)

Performance

I wish I had some better benchmarking tools but Xbench is all I have, sorry! It’s worth bearing in mind that the non-unibody MacBook Pro I have (MacBookPro3,1) is limited to 1.5GB/sec on the SATA bus (despite having an Intel ICH-8M SATA controller)

Xbench HD Test

My original performance figures with the original as-shipped 0001 firmware and Crucial’s updated 0002 firmware:

Thoughts

SSD is fast but given the hype I was expecting everything to be instant and it wasn’t quite there. Applications do normally launched within a single dock bounce and everything feels a lot snappier but there wasn’t the massive WOW! I was expecting – at least not yet.

There are also a few other advantages often overlooked, especially on a laptop:

• lower power consumption
• less weight, noise & heat
• greater shock, dust and magnetic resistance

Here’s a table that pulls the specs compared to the 7200RPM Travestar that was previously my main drive.

Time will tell how well the machine now deals with large Aperture libraries of RAW images and Visual Studio compilations from inside Parallels and I’ll be sure to report them here.

[)amien

MacBook Pro two year check-in

January 27th 2010 • Apple (Apple, freeware, MacBook-Pro) • 2,674 views • 3 responses

It’s been an interesting couple of years with nothing but a maxed-out MacBook Pro 17″ as my only home machine.

Failures

The hard drive died but time machine held my hand. At ALT.NET Seattle 2009 my backpack took a dive that left a dent in one corner. The battery was replaced and I roped GrinGod into obtaining a replacement UK-style \ key from the UK after some frantic typing.

A friend cracked the display when his keyfob sprang from his Batbelt culminating in a visit of the Apple Store in Bellevue. Ten days and $700 later got that fixed and included a bonus disconnected thermal sensor, a couple of new scratches, an extra screw to rattle around inside and a line of grease around the Apple logo.

Sticking with it

When I find myself eying the unibody I wince at the glossy ‘matt finish’ screen, the multi-touch trackpad clicks that sound like Robocop is nearby and a US keyboard that requires my pinky to hit a single-height enter key. That little pink dog won’t learn any new tricks. I’ve tried.

Still the OpenCL benchmark show the 8600M outperforming the newer 9400M and it does everything I need and at least one thing I don’t (gets hot enough to bake bread on). Short of switching the hard disk out for an SSD – I’ve ordered twice and then recalled after a Twitter volley of “no, you don’t want THAT one” – it’s here to stay for at least another year.

Applications

One thing that is always changing is the bunch of installed applications as I search for a combination that deliver a nirvana between productivity and enjoyment. Apps that perform a set of focused useful tasks with a shiny, eminently lick-able user interface, score highly.

I’ve rounded up my favourite apps before but here’s the latest specials on the menu.

CleanMyMac

This great-looking app helps reclaim wasted space making it a pre-requisite for SSD switchers.

Combining the PowerPC and foreign language code-purging of XSlimmer & TrimTheFat is also adds cache & log purging in with application uninstalls ala AppZapper etc.

Despite using XSlimmer already on my machine it was able to reclaim another 1.8GB and V2 is out soon which I hope will remove & alias duplicates given we’re not getting ZFS which had this feature (how many copies of Sparkle.framework do I have on my machine….)

Coda

This year I rewrote my blog’s WordPress theme from scratch and given the PHP requirement I found myself looking for an alternate IDE to Visual Studio. I already own TextMate but the feel of a raw text editor with bundles of extra bits feel didn’t have the gloss and usability I wanted such as fast preview, remote FTP sync etc. with a minimal of setup fuss.

I briefly toyed with Espresso during the early development cycle but Coda won me over in the end with it’s sheer simplicity and elegance plus the addition of built-in documentation for PHP was very helpful when working offline.

BetterTouchTool

Yes, when the Magic Mouse hit the street I picked one up. The idea of a mouse with trackpad multi-touch technology was appealing but a few minutes of use and no amount of twiddling would make it track  or let me configure it to take full advantage of what it should be able to do.

Until Apple sort this out BetterTouchTool is your friend letting you speed up the tracking of the Magic Mouse, or indeed your trackpad, and assign all sorts of interesting shortcuts and abilities to combinations of finger gestures.

Secrets

Mac apps tend to expose only the common options in their user interfaces but sometimes developers add some additional tweaks and settings behind the scenes that live in the Mac’s equivalent of the registry (known as “defaults“). While you can set these manually using the defaults command-line tool you still need to know the setting exists, it’s name and what options are available and so secrets exposes this.

Secrets is similar to Deeper and TinkerTool but the difference is that the secrets web site lets people add new options which then are automatically available within the installed preferences pane making them easily discoverable, searchable, applied… and occasionally undone.

Machinarium

This point-and-click adventure game will appeal to people who enjoyed Monkey Island although it feels more like the gorgeously submerging Beneath a Steel Sky.

The scenery is brilliantly imagined, stylistic and shows that very real lived-in cities can be beautiful especially when populated by cute robots capable of assembling themselves from their own body-parts (just like a triple 8 but infinitely cuter).

[)amien

Disappointing new MacBook Pros

October 14th 2008 • Apple (MacBook-Pro) • 563 views • 13 responses

Like many other MacBook Pro owners I’ve been waiting for the October 14th event with some excitement. The highlights include:

• Stronger aluminium block casing
• NVidia dual graphics for low-power or high-performance
• Glass multi-touch/multi-press trackpad

But the downsides are also worth noting, all of which make me think when I replace my 2.6GHz 17″ MBP in a year Apple aren’t going to have something I want to replace it with.

• No 17″ model
• 4GB RAM limit
• Glossy screen only
• 1440×900 resolution
• Firewire gone

Keith Combs has some similar observations in more depth while AppleInsider is suggesting a January refresh for the 17″

[)amien

Boot Camp 2.1, VMware Fusion 1.1.2 and MacBook Pro firmware

April 24th 2008 • Apple (boot-camp, MacBook-Pro) • 1,805 views • no response

Boot Camp 2.1

Apple have released Boot Camp 2.1 which finally includes official 64-bit support on Vista and support for Windows XP Service Pack 3.

This update may mean that 3D games will play without locking up or installing NVidia’s own drivers and that the trackpad functions correctly again (broken since Boot Camp 1.x)

MacBook Pro Firmware 1.5.1

Apple’s MacBook Pro Firmware Update 1.5.1 applies to all recent MacBook Pro’s including the ones with MBP31.0070.B05 firmware that the 1.5 update failed to upgrade leaving 17″ owners on MBP31.0070.B07.

The new firmware does not fix a problem where trackpad input would become jerky after suspending/sleeping and turning Airport off would make matters worse. 10.5.3 has fixes for Airport after sleeping which might solve the issue…

VMware Fusion 1.1.2

VMware Fusion 1.1.2 is just out and includes a host of fixes and improvements including:

• Windows XP Service Pack 3
• Network and USB compatibility
• Time Machine compatibility

Now that VMware lets Time Machine backup the VM image file and that Time Machine backs up modified files in their entirety you might want to exclude ~/Documents/Virtual Machines it unless you fancy loosing several gigabytes per hour whilst using a VM. Of course if you have your VM running off it’s own partition to allow Boot Camp too then that’s not an issue.

With any luck VMware will figure out a way of Time Machine backing up changed individual files within the Windows filesystem…

[)amien

One week with a MacBook Pro 17″

December 19th 2007 • Apple, Hardware (Apple, MacBook-Pro, vista) • 1,492 views • 5 responses

It has been one week since I picked up my new MacBook Pro 17″ to replace my aging first-generation 15″ model.

My initial concern was that the size and weight would be unwieldy after 4 years of lugging around a 15″ MacBook Pro and a prior to that a Titanium PowerBook G4. The actual problem was that my trusty Samsonite Trunk & Co. backpack could not accommodate it and that I’d have to hope Santa would deliver something a little bigger. Being properly kitted up might reveal if the dimensions and weight are uncomfortable so expect an update once I’ve travelled with the beast.

The screen is fantastic, a little brighter, and provides me with a desktop-like experience in terms of real estate thanks to the combination of the increased size and the high-definition 1920×1200 option. I had examined the glossy finish in-store and found having my face and the rest of the store glaring back at me far too distracting for real work (it might be nice for watching DVD’s in the dark I guess) and so went with the matte finish. Surprisingly it is a little more reflective than the older MBP but not overly so and it does make removing unwelcome fingerprints easier.

One problem I had with m 15″ was that heavy use of Visual Studio within Parallels wasn’t always cutting it on performance. Compilation was faster than the cheap HP/Compaq desktop I’d been using but still wasn’t snappy enough to keep my attention tightly focused ;-)

I went with top options – a 2.6GHz processor coupled with 4GB of RAM and a 7200RPM 200GB drive – to ensure maximum performance. Mac OS X and native Vista did not disappoint and felt like a speedy desktop despite Vista being 32-bit and limited to 3GB of RAM until Apple ship a 64-bit ready Boot Camp drivers and tools.

My .NET development typically takes place inside a virtual machine – previously Parallels but now evaluating VMware Fusion with its enticing dual-core and 64-bit guest OS support. Both Parallels and Fusion had similar almost-native performance in the disk and processor department on my 15″ according to Vista’s performance index and I’ve yet to rerun those (stay tuned). Whichever gets Aero/DirectX 9Ex shader support first will be my home for a while.

Battery life was a big surprise offering over 3 hours and I certainly feel less conscious of where the next power feed is coming from although that is partly due to the poor battery on my old machine being rather tired and worn.

One big disappointment is the keyboard. Firstly it is the same size as the 15″ model which leaves the extra space to the speaker grille. Whilst the speakers do sound far superior – good enough to actually listen to music on – I couldn’t help but feel a wider enter key, a second ctrl and a little f-key spacing could have gone a long way. What is more concerning is that many keys do not register if hit off-centre even by a slight amount :(

There are still some things to try:

• Games under native Vista taking advantage of the Nvidia 8600M GT chip
• Time Machining my MyBook Pro external drive over FireWire 800 (800 Mb/s) instead of USB2 (400 Mb/s)
• Burning DVD performance
• Removing DVD drive (UJ-85J FBZ8) region protection (RPC) to play my DVD collection

[)amien