Hey peeps!

Well, it’s complete. Franken-MacBook Pro is complete! The super drive optical drive is out and the HDD is back in. So far, the setup is amazing! I have Mac OS X Lion, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Windows 7 Ultimate and Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot installed side by side and all work super super good. Boot times are between 5 seconds (OS X OS’s) and 9 seconds (Windows 7). I bought a SATA III SSD but the capabilities of my MacBook Pro are only SATA II so a little zip is being missed. The setup is working very good for editing, Pro Software on the Solid State Drive, all of the assets and caching on the mechanical hard drive. Here is the comparison of Read/Write times between the mechanical drive and the SSD.  Here you can see that the SSD wrote data almost twice as fast as the HDD, and read data almost 4x as fast. This is only one facet of the speed increase. SSD drives have insanely fast I/O’s per second (data transferred in and out per second) as well as incredibly fast seek times. This is a key facet to the increased boot times. SSD’s don’t need to spin up and data isn’t scattered across the disk platter like in a HDD, so data can be retrieved far faster. In addition, I bumped the system RAM from 4gb’s to 8gb’s, both running at 1066mHz (although I wish I could use the 1866 mHz RAM I picked up for a desktop I’m building ;)

 

P.S I used the amazing Blackmagic Designs Hard Disk Speed Test, which is a phenomenal tool. You can adjust the various depths of stress testing you want to do (1 gb, 2 gb’s, 3gb’s, 4gb’s, 5gb’s…). Since I’m a cinephile and work with super high definition files, renders and other footage, the disk speed test will even tell you what formats of video and the applicable frame rates your drive setup would be capable of handling. Really handy!

 

I’ll keep blogging about improvements, but I’m super antsy to go play with my new toy ;)

 

Enjoy all!