Hot Rod a Mac Book Pro

Well I bought a new Unibody 15 inch 2.93 about a little over a month ago and what I decided was i needed a more portable unit that had a lot of horsepower and the MacPro was not as important but still get as close as i can to the performance of a MacPro. Very difficult task and the reality is you can get fairly close BUT the limiting factor at the end of the day is cores and just now getting totally around having 2 cores compared to 4 or 8 on a MacPro. Now I say this with some caveats because CS4 is a more Ram hunger program and you can cheat here to some degree. The issue is a program like C1 which is more core dependent and processor but again you can cheat but only so much. Also I say this with a fact that I use a 31 mpx back and obviously this will take horsepower.

Now there are really two parts to this process or better yet the way to set this up. maybe even better way to say this you can get a home option. Let me explain the best possible way to go. First obviously buy a new Unibody and either flavor will do the 17 inch or the 15 inch 2.93 or 2.66 you do get a about a 10 percent gain in the 2.93. Now I say these two models for a very specific reason they both can take 8gbs of Ram and now other processor can. Everything else like a 2.53 or 2.8 can only take 6gb so be careful on what unit you buy and you can't go wrong buying brand new on these because the 15 or 17 will take 8gb of ram. Also I am living proof the 15 inch can take 8gbs of Ram even though Apple said you could not , long story there. So either find your way to a Apple seller. let's make this simple for travel most will want the 15 inch and when at home rig it up to a 30 inch display or 24 inch display which you can do very easily. I have a 30 inch and can run both 30 and laptop screen at the same time. First I would order the 15 inch because of the travel need than I ordered the 2.93 and whatever ram Apple gives you, you are going to rip it out anyway so buy the lowest amount. Now little trick here get a 7200 drive in the box either a 250 or 320 and reason why is you will use this later as a travel drive in a enclosure like a LaCie that you will replace the drive with this one, they are mostly 5400 drives but some are 7200.

Okay first thing to do here is make sure your old box is loaded up with all the correct software you want and all updated and make sure you repair the permissions. Now some programs need to be deactivated before you transfer to a new box, CS4 and most Adobe products are of this type, so is Quark. Also do a just in case here and clone your old drive to a external using Carbon cloaner before you deactivate and continue with you new MBP . Than boot that up and use migrate assistant to transfer all your programs and settings over. Than make sure your repair the permissions on the new box as well and get that all running up to be spped before we continue with the Hot rod hardware.

Okay now everything on the new box is running and your feeling pretty good ,now time to open the bad boy up and get busy. First thing to do is replace the Ram with a kit by OWC for 719 dollars and it is 2 4gb chips to put in the MBP. Here is that link http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/8566DDR3S8GP/ actually the price dropped to 639.
At this point I would flip the MBP over and boot up and make sure the ram is being seen and the box actually boots up. If not seated correctly it won't boot. See this for install see step 12 http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/MacBook-Unibody/589/1

Okay now the fun begins. To get the maximum performance Raid 0 is the way to go since it bumps up the reads and writes of two drives together much higher than a single drive can do. Now the issue is putting 2 spinning drives in a laptop, it creates heat , sucks battery and gets downright noisy. So what to do the option is obvious and first off I did say this won't be cheap , fair warning but SSD is the way to go. Several very obvious advantages nothing spinning for one, zero latency, runs cool , draws little battery power, more rugged since no moving parts and good at altitude. All the stuff you want for a road warrior machine. Okay the downside besides being expensive the write times are slower but the read times are blazingly fast. Programs open in less than two seconds if not immediate and all at once now less, as fast as you can hit all your dock items there up and running. Now performance wise does not mean much but the can read data extremely fast and when you Raid 0 them they get even faster but you gain on the writes and when processing and working in Cs4 saving files is all about write times.

Now the best SSD on the market today are Intel,yes there are some that maybe faster and and all that but the Intels overall from all reports just perform better on all counts. Now I have the M class SSD intels and for most folks these are a excellent choice and 2 80gb drives are 320 dollars they have gone down in price as well http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...ption=&Ntk=&CFG=&SpeTabStoreType=&srchInDesc=

Now two 80 gb in Raid ) is 160 gbs together but you will only get 148 total. Now as a single drive the reads and writes are
Sequential Access - Read: Up to 250MB/s
Sequential Access - Write: Up to 70MB/s

Now when you Raid 0 them you get about 50 percent and more read and write speed which is really good.

Now if you want to go for broke and I mean broke you can get the E class and become the missile not just the rocket it fires from. Now hold your breath they are 782 EACH 64gb drive and you need TWO of them http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167014

But as you see the reads and writes are much faster in the single drive
Sequential Access - Read: up to 250 MB/s
Sequential Access - Write: up to 170 MB/s

The key here is the Writes jumped to 170 and in Raid ) at 50 percent more well you can see you are cooking here but also with a lot less money in your pocket.

I went for the M drives for now until the E class drops in price at some point in life and hopefully these numbers go up on speeds and prices drop plus the drives get bigger. But if you are a pig and want bragging rights this is your answer.

Now the question comes in how to install two drives in a MBP. Well kiss your optical drive goodbye and need to install a bracket instead there to connect a SSD drive in its place. Maxupgrades sells them and also MCE http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/...B&Category_Code=STORHDOPTIBAY&Product_Count=0
and http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=Product.display&product_id=186

I bought the Maxupgrades and mine did not come with instructions since I was pretty new to buy it but maybe now they have them with the product but you can get a good idea here how it goes in place of the optical steps 13,14 and 15 here http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/MacBook-Unibody/589/2

Okay once you get all these parts installed you need to take out your original drive and use a small Firewire 800 enclosure or a Voyager that you can boot up from. Once you boot up with your new drives in place than you need to initialize them and you can do that within your disk utility and than a good idea here is to follow Lloyds guides http://macperformanceguide.com/Storage-RAID.html.

I highly recommend Lloyds site for all kinds of tips and tricks as well.

Once you have that all done you should be ready to go. I have more details on this and just ask and we can address them here for you. But let me drop into home use. And when you are at home you can Raid 0 two 3.5 drives in a enclosure and run a E-sata cable to the Express port and again you will find that data on Lloyds site but the Express card that has the highest transfer speeds is the Sonnet http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet Technology/SATAIIPROE34/

Now with this setup you can actually run a OS outside the box in Raid O using the E-sata connection. With that you can run two very high speed 3.5 drives like you would on a MacPro and get transfer speeds up to 200mgs/per second with the Sonnet card. So you can have a home use setup as well and also have a Drobo connected with firewire and several other options as well.

I will stop here for questions and such and hopefully others can help out as well.