Want more speed on the cheap ?

[Frank Doorhof]

With SSD being too small or very expensive when you want a bigger size I was looking for another way to speed up my MBP considerably.
I think many will benefit from this that work with MF files so I posted it here.

Seagate has a drive on the market with NAND memory on it (4GB and 32MB cache), it's a 2.5" drive so it fits in your MBP without a problem, change time was app 5 minutes. The speed in crease is spectaculair. It will not be like SSD but it's well worth the investment.
I paid app 120.00 euro for the 500GB version which is a lot cheaper than SSD (with less space) and it's a lot faster than my standard MBP drive.

I was so impressed I also put one into my MacPro.
Building that one inside is a bit more difficult because of the slider mechanism in the macpro but we are looking for a small cable that will connect the drive, at the moment it's hanging inside hold in place by some carton.
Also on the macpro the speed increase is very good, boot time is about 30% faster but working in photoshop is 50-60% faster.

For a more detailed write up see :
http://www.frankdoorhof.com/site/?p=463

Hope you can do something with this tip.

[Dustbak]

You could use the OWC 2.5" to 3.5" converter kit and put the drive under the optical bay. I will have to look into that drive. I am planning on changing my boot drive on the MacPro to a SSD.

The work drive is a 4 drive RAID0 which I soon will change with 2TB black caviars, this raid is faster than a SSD.

Did you need to deactivate all your applications before changing the boot drive on your MacPro? (stuff like PS, many plug-ins, etc..) This hassle is what is kind of keeping me of changing the boot drive. I am the kind of person that forgets one or 2 applications and have to go through a painful proces of retrieving the licenses again to be able to use the software.

[Frank Doorhof]

I just cloned the drive.
Everything seems to work fine.
Only the firewall keeps asking me for permissions which I add.

The convertor from OWC doesn't work for me because the drive in the sliders is placed upside down and the OWC we have here has the mounting screws on the side.

[Dustbak]

Both bays for the optical drives are filled? The sliding bays cannot be used with this converter but the bays for the optical drives can. There actually even is an extra s-ata cable right there that can be used.

[Frank Doorhof]

Ah That you mean. No only one bay is used.
I Will try to figure out how to get it in there.

One Quick question is That also sata 3 ?

[Frank Doorhof]

Got it, indeed pretty simple.

[David Watson]

Hi Ray

I have just updated my Macpro with 4 x 2TB drives.  I backed up to an OWC firewire drive using Time Machine and put my Snow leopard disc in the DVD drive before shutting down.  I then replaced all four drives and rebooted from the DVD (press the C option), selected RAID utility, created and then formatted the RAID drive (as a RAID 0+1 in my case).  When rebooting from the DVD I discovered that I had to disconnect everything except the keyboard mouse and monitor otherwise you get a "kernel panic" (this is a screen which says that there has been a problem and you need to restart in several languages).  Once the drive was formatted I reconnected my firerwire drive and selected restore from Time Machine (or something ver similar) from the menu.

Prior to closing the machine down I had decativated all my Adobe products but when the restore was complete everything worked without having to rekey in all of the codes including CS5.

It all works well and is noticeably faster than my previous RAID 5 setup with 4 x 500GB drives.  I just used 4 x Hitachi 7200RPM drives - nothing fancy.

I then did one more thing and replaced the two DVD drives with newer faster ones as I was getting some verify errors.  I like having two of these drives as it is a convenient way of copying DVD's which I need to do occasionally.

Best David

[Frank Doorhof]

I used carbon copy. No problem at all.

[Dustbak]

Thx guys! I will try carbon copy first to see if that works. Since I don't wreck my boot drive I can always put it back and deactivate my software.

Frank, did you use both installs (your license allows you for 2 installations & activations) for stuff like Photoshop? If you did not, make sure you still are able to install Photoshop on a second machine. I always thought the license activation was linked to the harddrive (instead of something like the processor-id or the network adapters mac address).

[BJNY]

IMO, these are the best sleds to fit 2.5" into Mac Pro:
http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=Product.display&product_id=180

I recently put OWC SSD into Mac Pro 6-core.

There are different sleds depending which vintage Mac Pro 

[Frank Doorhof]

Joh,
I Think the main difference can be seen when using the sane files over and over like with Photoshop.
In fact there only is ofcourse 4GB of NAND memory.

So when doing a standard test with new first time use files I guess you won't see much increase, maybe a little.
Overal my machine is in Photoshop and for example nik noticeably faster.

[nightfire]

What is the manufacturer part# for this drive? I googled "Seagate" and "NAND" and found a drive with ID ST95005620AS. Is this the right one? Just want to make sure that I order the right thing...

Thanks for the write up!

[nightfire]

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/ST95005620AS/

Thanks!

[nightfire]

Hmm... one more question. I just read a couple of reviews on other sites. An occasional, yet too-frequent-to-ignore complaint seems to be about (a) drive noise and vibrations being louder compared to a standard drive, as well as (b) the drive going to sleep after a few minutes under onboard firmware control, without the possibility of overriding this in Mac OS.

Have any of you Mac/Macbook users who tried this had such issues?

[John.Murray]

I've been running a 250gb in my MBP 13" for a couple of months now - highly recommended

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148593&cm_re=seagate_momentus_xt-_-22-148-593-_-Product

[Frank Doorhof]

No problems yet, on both the Macpro and the MBP I don't see any difference in sound level, or going to sleep.
But I must add that I work with my machines and don't lie my ear to the case to hear if it's a little bit louder.
But from what I THINK it's not louder than the Momentum Seagate it replaced.

It's by the way indeed the Momentum XT drive, sorry I did not mention that here.
Also it's true that the drive has to "learn" especially in photoshop after a few photos in my workflow speed picks up considerably.

[Fritzer]

I wished I had gotten this one when I upgraded the HDD of my MBP, looks pretty good.
But it was just out then, and on back-order everywhere, and I got a WD Scorpio Black for a good price, so that's fine.

As for speed increase - did you replace a 5400 HDD with it (MBP), and was that harddrive wiped clean on a regular basis ?
Going from a 5400 to a 7200 HDD , in combination with using a fresh system clone, can do wonders in a laptop.
OSX DOES fragment drives !

As for using it in a MacPro - I only some reviews, but it seems the Momentum XT is still behind in speed compared to even the 'old' Velociraptor (not Raptor), so it might not be such a good option for desktop drives.
I believe it's about as fast as a current 1TB Caviar Black, which isn't too shabby.
Have you tried it in a Raid0 ? I'm wondering if the NAND still works then.

[Frank Doorhof]

I replaced a Momentum 7200rpm in my MBP i7