MacOS – Some information about an extra SSD drive in MacBook Pro

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I have a MacBook Pro (6,2; mid 2010; 4GB DDR3, 2,66 i7) And for a while now, I've been thinking about building in a SSD in my Mac.

My first plan was to switch my 512GB drive with a 512GB SSD, but the prices of those things made me think again.
Then I learned about OptiBay, a company which allows you to switch your optical drive with a secondary hard drive.
So I came up with the plan to switch my drive with a 128GB SSD where I'll install Mountain Lion on and by so keeping my 512GB drive for all the data.

But the world of SSD is fairly new to me. So I've got some questions for those who are more familiar with this topic.

  1. Which method would you use to switch the drive with the SSD? (OptiBay,…)
  2. I heard some rumors about the performance of the SSD, something about limited times you could read/write the drive. Are those rumors true?
  3. Is there a way to recover my optical drive and use it as an external drive (I think OptiBay offers such a way)
  4. When will I gain the most performance gain? Installing only my OS on my SSD or when I install all my extra software on the SSD as well? Or which combination will give me the most performance gain?

Best Answer

  1. The OptiDrive and similar products work very well. I have the similar Date Doubler (OWC) installed in my 2009 Mac Mini and am very pleased. The combination of the fast but small SSD and still having the larger but slower HDD is the best you can do until prices come down. Optical media is passé, as you can see by Apple now systematically dropping it from its product line, and you can easily get by with only an external drive for occasional use.
  2. Yes there's a limit on the number of write cycles on an SSD but it is mitigated by the firmware on newer drives which have complex "wear levelling" algorithms (basically evenly distributing writes across the disk to reduce wear) and most (though not all, check the drive specs) manufacturers ship drives with about 10% "hidden" reserve space that gets put into operation as bad blocks fail (so called over-provisioning.) Further more there are some measures you can take yourself to limit writes to disk, such as the mounting your drive with the noatime option (see"Optimizing MacOS X Lion for SSD") which will tell the OS not to update (write) the accessed time every time you read a file.
  3. Yes OWS sells an enclosure that will take a mac Superdrive. I'm sure others can be found also.
  4. You will get the most performance gain putting everything on SSD, obviously. However, this is not always practical. You may have large files (e.g. VMWare images) or large collection of files (e.g. iTunes folder) that take up an inordinate amount of space on the SSD. Personally I put everything on the SSD and then create links for those directories (Movies, Pictures, Music) to the internal HDD. Applications I recommend keeping on the SSD no matter how large because of the performance boost.

One more recommendation: when choosing an SSD do a thorough search on the internet regarding OSX compatibility. Some SSD drives do not support SATA-III speeds on OSX and yet others require a firmware update to do so. I've seen even hardcore tech nerds get bitten by that one.

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