Aussie Tech Guys: A Guide To Owc Ssd For Mac
The Apple MacBook Pro with Retina display has one annoying flaw: Not enough storage. Many shipped with a paltry 128GB of built-in flash storage while most shipped with just 256GB.
The question now is, “How can I upgrade my Retina MacBook Pro with more SSD storage?” The best storage solution is upgrading to a larger built-in SSD drive, which means you’ll need to open up your case and install the new drive. This is pretty easy these days, but if you’re worried, there are two easier options. Instead of installing a new internal flash-based SSD drive, you can use tiny flash-based drives in the shape of camera memory cards. They plug into the SDXC card slot on your MacBook Pro.
Aussie Tech Guys: A Guide To Owc Ssd For Mac Pro
The is a tiny drive that you can combine with your built-in drive to create a single “fused” storage system on your MacBook Air or Pro. For all intents and purposes, the acts like a little USB thumb drive — but it fits flush into the SDXC card slot instead of a USB port. When installed, it appears on your Mac like an external drive that is always on, always available. It appears as a separate storage option to your Mac’s operating system yet remains assessable because you don’t have to worry about plugging it in since you leave it installed. It’s quite handy but you have to pay attention to where you’re storing things — on your built-in storage drive or on the JetDrive Lite. The, on the other hand, also uses the SDXC card slot, but when you install it with an included software program, it combines with your built-in storage to form a single “fused” drive.
Use this guide to remove or replace the solid state drive (SSD) in your MacBook Pro 13' Retina Display Early 2015. I have purchased the OWC ssd and this guide is perfect for my install. Guys, can you please tell us if we can us any kind of M2 drives ( if the format fits).
If you want a near-permanent — but easy storage solution for your Retina MacBook Pro — the TarDisk Pear system might be your best bet. Are there any downsides to these two solutions? The SDXC card slot storage drives are not as fast as a dedicated internal drive, and they basically mean you won’t be transferring your photos using that slot anymore (if you do at all). Moving on, let’s get back to replacing your drive: If you need more storage space on your Retina MacBook Pro — up to a whopping 1TB — two companies have upgrade kits that can help you do it. The MacBook Pro with Retina Display Storage Upgrade While the MacBook Pro seems to be a sealed case, you can open it up to upgrade the solid-state flash storage with a new, larger solid-state drive.
If you’re moderately handy, you can do it. Here’s how to do it in 5 steps: 1.
Identify Your MacBook Pro with Retina Display Not all MacBook Pro with Retina display MacBooks contain the same flash storage system, and you have to match your MacBook Pro to the kits that it is compatible with. Right now, you can get upgrade kits from Transcend or OWC if you have the “Mid 2012,” “Late 2012,” and “Early 2013” MacBook Pro 13-inch and 15-inch with Retina display models. (Apple didn’t make upgrading these new MacBook Pro models easy, but OWC figured out how to create an option for us, which we appreciate.) How do you figure out which MacBook Pro model number you have? You can go to the upper left Apple menu on your screen and select “About This Mac.” The popup window will have the basic model description and year description of release in it.
If you have any trouble with this, Apple has a support page that will help you, along with the serial number, etc. The description has wording like “15-inch, Mid 2012″ or “13-inch, Early 2013.” 2. Find the SSD Storage to Fit Your MacBook Pro with Retina Display Basically, you have two great choices of manufacturers, OWC and Transcend. You can buy direct from OWC or get Transcend’s kits from Amazon. Transcend’s new come with the tools you need, including a handy enclosure for your old drive.
Is also a kit that includes the SSD storage module, the correct screwdrivers, plus a cable and case to help transfer your data to the new drive. Here’s the kit links for both options, but as I mentioned above, only OWC offers kits for older Retina MacBooks as well as the newer “Late 2013” up to “2015” MacBook Pro with Retina display models. Transcend only offers models that fit Mid 2012, Late 2012, and Early 2013 MacBook Pros with Retina displays in 13-inch or 15-inch models:. — the kit comes in 240GB, 480GB, and 1TB options.
— the kit comes in 240GB, 480GB, or 960GB options 3. Clone or Transfer Your Data to the New SSD Drive While I use, which is a third-party app that lets you make complete clones of your drives or create ongoing backups, you can also use Apple’s Time Machine or boot into recovery mode and use Apple’s built-in Disk Utility to get the job done. Transcend, it turns out, recommends that you use Apple’s Disk Utility, which is a fairly simple way to go (see step 4). Note: The MacBook Pro SSD drives are exposed modules that are more fragile than a fully enclosed hard drive. Before you crack the case and handle the modules, you might want to have a separate backup of your important data. There are a lot of ways you can back up your data, but the easiest way is to and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your entire drive as a bootable backup to your external drive.
Alternately, you can just copy your important photos, videos, and documents. (Bonus: The key benefit of an external drive is that you can store it somewhere that is not your home — for example, if there’s a fire, your important family photos will be safe.) 4. Check Out Video Walkthroughs and Online Guides on its website, but I also like the Transcend video walkthrough, which is fast and clear.
After you watch the guides, if all this seems too risky for your skills, find a buddy who has done it before — or have your local computer store do it for you. Perform Your Retina MacBook Pro Storage Upgrade The data cloning process might take a couple of hours, but the actual installation should take less than half an hour. You want to do the installation in a clean place with enough free time without distractions to complete the process end-to-end.
You may also want to consider buying an anti-static mat. Personally, I’ve never bothered, but I’ve been willing to take my chances. Proceed at your own risk. Finally, don’t rush through it. Pay attention and put all the tiny screws in a bowl so they don’t roll off your desk and get lost in your carpet.
I’ve known some guys to set the screws on a tray in the relative position that they removed them — just to make sure they put the right screw in the right spot during reassembly. Keep taking photos, making movies, and fill up your new drive! At the very least, you can always use the handy external portable hard drive from your kit to store content that doesn’t absolutely have to be on your MacBook Pro with Retina display. Making it even easier to have enough storage for your Mac. Get the Gear:. — in 240GB, 480GB, or 1TB. — in 240GB, 480GB, or 960GB.
I just replaced my 17″ Unibody MacBookPro’s hard drive with a new Corsair 256GB SSD. The SSD uses Samsung chips and controller. First I made an image of my BootCamp partition using WinClone. Next I ran one final Time Machine backup to my Time Capsule. After that was complete, I shut the machine down. I swapped the new hard drive for the old one. The SSD is MUCH lighter than the OEM hard drive.
I booted up with the Leopard OS X Install DVD. I selected the disk utility from the menu, and formatted the new hard drive with an HFS+ partition. I then had to reboot in order for the new partition to show up under the Restore option. After rebooting to the Install DVD again, select the Restore option from the menu, and select your most recent Time Machine backup. The step where it’s calculating the size of the backup can take a VERY long time.
The restore itself can take a while. My 220 GB took about 8 hours to restore. Now you should be able to boot into your system from the new hard drive. If you don’t use BootCamp you can skip these steps:.
Run the Boot Camp Assistant and recreate the Boot Camp partition. Make sure it’s the same size or larger than your previous one. Start the Windows installation process using your WIndows install CD/DVD. Make sure you format the Boot Camp partition.
Once it starts actually installing Windows, you can force a shut down. Boot back into OS X, and use WinClone to restore your Boot Camp image to the partition on the SSD.
It’s like having a new machine. Booting used to take 60-90 seconds from off to 100% up and ready, including Quicksilver loading up, etc Now it takes about 5 seconds. Applications load pretty much instantly, without bouncing in the dock. Shutdowns and sleep happen instantly. The whole machine feels amazingly faster.
It’s not the cheapest thing, but it’s a very worthwhile upgrade. Thxthat was my only concern. Now all that’s left is finding the fastest SSD, cause I’ve seen very different results in the speed. Don’t know if it’s true, but would be a shame to invest in an expensive slow SSD Final question: You write that after clean installation, you choose Restore option from the menu. Is this a default option you get when doing a clean install? (I also have a TC, and would off course like to restore this on a new harddisk and you make it seem like it’s very simple) PS: I will wait to install a SSD untill after I have bought Snow Leopard – Apple will tell us on monday when this is possible.meanwhile prices will maybe go down or the capacity will go up! Cheers, Lindkold.
Lindkold, I was impressed by the benchmarks on the drive I ended up getting. The Corsairs uses the Samsung chips and is very fast on benchmarks and in real life. I’m VERY happy with it. I don’t actually do the OS X installation, I just format the drive, reboot back to the installer, and then in one of the menus in the menu bar, before you actually install OS X, there’s a “Restore” option, which lets you just pull the data from the TC. It works great. Yes, I’m also looking forward to Monday, and Snow Leopard. Hey Rick, do you have any references on that that refer to the current generation of SSDs?
While SSD cells do limited write-cycles, modern wear-leveling firmware makes this pretty much a non-issue for normal users like myself. Samsung’s specs on the MLC MTBF (mean time between failures) is over a million hours of “normal” use, versus 700,000 hours for a normal HD: Combine that with the fact that the lack of moving parts is a big win for reliability, especially in a laptop like mine that gets moved, carried, bumped, etc Also the performance is night and day, still. When I use someone else’s computer I immediately have to check activity monitor to find what’s burning all the CPU and making things slow, only to find there’s nothing, it’s just that I’m used to way more speed, which is from the SSD.
П™‚ Devon. SSDs do have shorter life spans under ideal conditions, but SSDs are also, more or less, completely resistant to mechanical failure. In the time that you would need to cause an SSD to fail, assuming you didn’t intentionally defragment it daily, you would have mostly likely damaged an HDD mechanically, assuming you use it in a laptop. Google “anandtech” and “SSD” for technical details on the pros and cons of SSD.
In general, when an SSD starts to die, you will know about way beforehand. This is usually not the case with HDD. Also, SSD is lighter, typically much more energy efficient, and once again, it is resistant to mechanical vibration. I think in the future, we will start seeing more computers with small SSDs for the operating system and critical information, and HDDs as storage drives (Facebook cache, et cetera, lol).
Hi, Brilliant article. Just received my first Macbook Pro 13″ today. Ive been thinking of moving over to Macs from PC for a long time and I finally took the decision.
I’m thinking of installing an SSD and I thought I’d take your advice on the Kingston SSDNow V 128 GB SATA 3 GB/s 2.5″ with the Upgrade Kit Bundle. Its a good deal for 270$.
Im just not sure if it’ll fit or if I need an adapter of some sort. Ive seen other queries on the same issue; but mine’s a 13″. So just being careful:o) Appreciate the help. Hi Rick–thanks for posting this article. What you’ve done is precisely what I’m considering doing, but I have one major question to ask you: in addition to the faster speed and lighter weight, does the SSD make the MacBook Pro run any cooler, temperature-wise? My 13″ MacBook Pro is constantly running at a very high temperature, often a lot warmer than I want it to if actually using it as a true “lap” top computer. My theory is that a SSD would solve this problem–no moving parts to create heat, right, not to mention less battery power being used to power that extra movement.
So, yeah, I’m thinking about an SSD solution here, but I wanted to ask someone who has done this before I actually take the plunge. Will switching out to an SSD help my heat issues??? Thanks for the reply, Devon, and sorry for getting your name mixed up with a previous poster. You said something that causes me to ask a further question, not quite related to the SSD thing, but I’ll ask it anyway. I am brand new to the world of computer upgrades–never installed extra memory or anything of that sort. You mentioned that maxing out the CPU for extended periods of time can contribute to the heat problem I’m experiencing. I run a stock trading application that constantly streams stock info, so I’m wondering if perhaps that could contribute to the issue.
I’ve got a 2.26ghz CPU with 2g of memory and a 160gb HD. What might help if the streaming application is the source of the problem? The SSD upgrade seems logical, but might adding extra memory be a better solution? It’s easy to tell: just start up the Activity Monitor application (/Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor). The CPU tab will show you how much CPU is being used. If it’s showing a lot of User% and not much Idle% than you’re using a lot of CPU and that’s making things hot. A SSD won’t help much in that case.
If you look at the System Memory tab, that will tell you if upgrading your RAM would help. The important ones there are Free and Swap used. SSDs are primary faster, being cooler is a nice benefit but I’m not sure you should buy one just for that reason.
Thanks for this, Devon. Sorry to continue to ask questions unrelated to the original article, but I googled RAM and Swap Used and couldn’t make heads or tails out of things, so I’m going to ask you about what I found. My CPU usage doesn’t seem to be a problem at all–it seems to vary between 80-90% Idle.so I’m guessing that is good. About RAM, though, under the Memory tab in Activity monitor, sometimes my “Free” readout is as low as 50MB, sometimes as much as 200MB. Swap Used is 1.07GB.
The computer is 2G of memory, though the pie chart in Activity monitor lists it at 1.75GB total. Soooo.with the “Free” readout being as low as 50MB, could I benefit from adding memory? Or am I fine with what I’ve got? My computer had been running a little slow, but seems to have improved after running a “Clean My Mac” application I bought online. So would more memory be overkill??
Devon, I am currently purchasing a 17-inch LED – MacBook Pro 2.66GHz Intel Core i7. I plan to purchase this item with the standard RAM (4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM) because I can easily purchase 8.0GB (4.0GB x 2 Kit) NuRAM DDR3 PC3-8500 1066MHz SO-DIMM w/Lifetime Warranty for $168.99 at OWC as opposed to dropping the $360 that APPLE charges for the upgrade.
I also plan to purchase this item with the standard hard drive (500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm) and purchasing a SSD to install as opposed to purchasing the $585 that APPLE charges an upgrade to the 256GB Solid State Drive by Toshiba. My question for you is: What is the best SSD available for the computer that I am going to purchase? I figure that if I am to drop that much $$$ into a laptop, I would like to equip it with the best/fastest SSD. Thanks DevonI appreciate your response. By the way, even though I have my old machine saved via Time MachineI want to start fresh and just pull certain shizzl and programs from the back-up disk. So when installing the Vertex 3I only have to do what you stated before and just manually install the driveuse the Install DVD that comes with the new mac to format it and then install the operating system via disk that comes with it??? I actaully wouldn’t mind you spoonfeeding me the steps because honestly I’ve never changed out or upgraded the hard drive of any computeronly an operating operating system.
So I would appreciate any needed steps I must follow that you recommendthanks a million! Geert, FWIW I’m only counting the post-EFI part of the boot sequence since until the OS itself starts to boot will have no impact on any hardware changes. Total boot time is probably closer to 15-20 seconds or so. The post-EFI portion used to be 60-90 and is now about 5.
Transfer speeds are just part of it. Seek time is another major factor. The stock 5400 rpm drive’s xbench Disk Test score is about 40-50.
The OCZ Vertex3 gets a Disk Test score of 389, so it’s about 10 times faster. I’m not going to make a video of my laptop just for you, sorry:) But here are some good YouTube links that show just how much of a difference SSDs make: From the last video: The startup time of the system is: HDD: 1 min 5 sec SSD: 16 sec That’s with a Vertex 2 which is much slower than a Vertex 3.