Hot Rod a Mac Book Pro

[Guy Mancuso]

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.../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-Lo...-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/Produc...e=&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/Produc...82E16820167014

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/m...roduct_Count=0
and http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/in...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-Lo...-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/Sonne.../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.

[Guy Mancuso]

Worn out , my fingers hurt from typing

[Ben Rubinstein]

What are the read/write times of a regular 7200rpm drive for comparison?

[Lars Vinberg]

Guy, Hehe awesome typing thanks for sharing. Sounds like it's time for Apple to offer a quadcore MacBook. Where are you WRT heat and battery life? Not a priority obviously but still interesting.

Ben, 7200RPM drives get up to about 80 MB/sec R and W (average throughput - peak is about 100 MB/sec), the new Seagate 7200.4 drives just smoke the competition.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts...hmarks,53.html

[Guy Mancuso]

Lars as far as heat there really is none. The only place I feel heat is in the connection area but the box runs at 49c and the fans are 2000 rpm at idle. It will crank up when processing. Battery life I have not really given it a good test but so far it looks better than my old MBP.

If Apple came out with a quad core, might be not many would go for a MacPro. I have a lot of stuff hanging off the side as they say so I could get pretty close to having a lot of capability in a laptop with Firewire 800 and the E-sata. I have a lot of hard drive space with a Drobo and a external e-sata drive.

[Ben Rubinstein]

I only need 40GB for an operating system if I just get a couple of 32 GB drives and raid 0 them together it would be a lot cheaper. Would I really need the expensive Intels?

Couple of questions: Firstly are the 1500000 or whatever read/write cycles sufficient for drives which will be used for OS, programs, scratch and page on a computer that is left on the whole time?

Secondly I read that certain OS's don't like the SSD's. Why, what and is this a real issue?

[Guy Mancuso]

There was a boot camp issue with the Intels when they first came out Ben and you needed a firmware update. I did that with mine but the new ones are all set to go now. My fully loaded system even with I tunes stuff is 42gb so yes you could go 2 32 for 64 but maybe only get 56gb out of it . Cutting is a little close. You also want you drives to have elbow room to run from what I understand. There are also some other units from OZX Vertex I believe that are said to be pretty good an a lot cheaper 60gb at 275 each http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227433
I would look into these further though before making the purchase. There should be some reviews on them out there.
The only way scratch really helps is if you have faster than what you are using as a OS or equal to it otherwise the OS can handle it pretty well . When you will get in trouble is pushing very very large files otherwise I have no scratch myself but my machine beats my old MacPro in CS4 times but not my C1 times. There its all about cores with my big files. My only real limitation is C1 processing is slower than it was but Cs4 i am getting good test numbers. I ran short of money to finish this off but if I had a Raid 0 external box running through the express slot than scratch would help me. But as it is the scratch i have a single 7200 drive is doing nothing faster with scratch. Maybe Jack can talk more about scratch than me as he understands that better than I do but a single drive outside the box is doing nothing for me. But I don't get much past a 700gb file. Stitching this maybe a area that scratch really becomes important otherwise go pour a cup of coffee. LOL

[Lars Vinberg]

There are different technologies for the memory used in SSD's. The expensive tech that Intel uses is called SLC, wheras cheaper tech is called MLC which has unimpressive write speed. The drives you see in netbooks are all MLC.

http://geekadviser.com/2008/12/mlc-v...nd-their-uses/

In short, SLC is faster and much more reliable, and has greater lifespan.

Re r/w cycles, it's that many cycles in the same location, so it will last much longer than a hard drive.

[Guy Mancuso]

Thanks Lars you are filling in my gaps perfectly. LOL

I know you know a lot about this stuff as well and really I am pretty low on the totem poll of this kind of knowledge

[Lars Vinberg]

Yeah you're all pragmatic what does it give me and what's the price tag LOL
Great to see you pushing the limits though, I don't have the budget for that.

[Ben Rubinstein]

Lars, even those with a 150mb/s are almost double the speed of a regular hard drive are they not? A couple of even the less spectacular drives in a raid 0 will still smoke a regular HD and as there is zero seek I can use it for swap file and pagefile as well. Should be able to do it for about $250 which isn't that much for a serious speed upgrade.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

BTW Guy, I'm running my OS and all programs on a drive that's 25 GB. Even add an 8GB Pagefile and I'm not exactly going to be stretching it with 55 or so gigabytes. Everything non program or OS is on seperate internal drives.

Just been doing some research, the SSD drives are working on about a £=$ basis here in the UK. I haven't got the time to mess about with this anyway with the big summer wedding season about to happen but maybe when it's finished I'll get some send over from the US. They'll be cheaper by then anyway.

[stephengilbert]

Ben,

Examine that tree. Although the Intel drives are more expensive, the additional price may be worth paying. Here's an article comparing the various brands which favors the Intel. (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...lash,2127.html) And I believe Lloyd Chambers still does as well.

Of course, these things are changing fast, and six months from now they'll likely be cheaper. If I were buying one today, I'd get an Intel. (And I did, a few weeks ago.)

Steve

[Ben Rubinstein]

I don't need it, certainly not that level of speed. No excuse to spend that level of money. If it's only a couple of hundred then I don't mind and if it gives me double plus speed then I'm happy. More than that, even for the bigger boost - it's just not worth it for me to spend.

If a regular HD is 70mbs and a cheap SSD is 150mbs and then I raid 0 it then I've already well got over double the speed.

[Ben Rubinstein]

Just read that article. Hmmm. Didn't realise that the mbs figures were based on numbers picked out of the air. Heck maybe I'll just wait a bit...

[Guy Mancuso]

Ben just watch the speeds advertised on some of these SSD. Look at some reviews for sure before outputting money , heard some stories speeds not as advertised. But there are some good ones out there.

[Lars Vinberg]

Originally Posted by Ben Rubinstein

Lars, even those with a 150mb/s are almost double the speed of a regular hard drive are they not?

Yep by competition to the Samsung 7200.4 I referred to other hard drives. Of course bandwidth is not everything. Even the cheaper MLC SSDs have extremely short access time compared to HDs, which is great for OS type maneuvers where many small files are involved, but almost irrelevant for Guy's 31 Mpx files.

[glenerrolrd]

With some generous help from Guy, the expert advice on diglloyd s website and the OWC videos ....I now have version one of my hot rod MacBook pro.

I started with the same 2.93 MacBook Pro and the 320gb/7200 drive. Upgraded the ram to 8Gb and installed a 160gb intel x25m ssd. This necessitated my updating essentially all my relevant software (since I was still happily running Tiger ).

Not everything made sense to me for example LR was taken off my machine and I reinstalled by downloading the current version. So far no requests for the serial numbers ? So the system must have retained the adobe authorization.

Capture One is loaded and I am busily studying the manual and creating a file of test images to work with.

Leopard is actually the biggest change and getting used to the touch pad (well it sucks) but new safari is great and now all the software is matched to the current operating system.

The SSD is so fast I can not keep up with it. Screen loading is blazingly fast .

My plan is to work with this configuration until the prices of the SSD come down a bit and then add a second 160gb SSD . Right now its too expensive and unnecessary.

I did buy a Voyager which was very helpful in cloning backups at each step in the process. I was overly careful and never had a glitch.

No excuses now.

Thanks Guy and to others that advised me

Roger Dunham

[Guy Mancuso]

Great news Roger sounds like it all fell into place perfectly. One more thing do a backup OS on some external drive and file it away just in case something happens to the laptop.

Also Roger cool thing with Carbon cloner is you can schedule incremental backups. To external drive or partition that is like a ongoing backup. It will look like this, use this drive as a emergency boot up if something weird happens. This way you have a permanent backup that sits in a drawer and than this one is a ongoing backup. I'm not the biggest fan of time machine reason I go this route and it's faster. Time machine actually slows down your system as it is backing up

[Lars Vinberg]

I came across these links to Apple's manuals today, there is a description inside on how to replace hard drive:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/...h_Late2008.pdf

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/..._Early2009.pdf

[stephengilbert]

Lars,

I can top that. Other World Computing has videos showing installation of all sorts of hardware, inclduing hard drives: http://eshop.macsales.com/installvideos/

Steve

[glenerrolrd]

Good ideas all around I watched the OWC videos and they were dead on. I also always buy the small tool set ..beacuse its $17 for the tools and $6-700 for the ssd. Made it quick and easy.

Has anyone found an inexpensive housing for bare naked drives. With the voyager you can get really fast and cheap drives ...but they naked like you install them . I was thinking of something like the old VCR tape boxes.

[Guy Mancuso]

back to OWC Roger they have some really nice enclosures for Firewire 800 and USB for laptop drives

USB http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/USB2/OWC_Express

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other...ng/MSTG800U2K/

[glenerrolrd]

Originally Posted by Guy Mancuso

back to OWC Roger they have some really nice enclosures for Firewire 800 and USB for laptop drives

USB http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/USB2/OWC_Express

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other...ng/MSTG800U2K/

Guy I am looking for cheap as I have a Voyager and these would be backups. I am thinking like a VCR box like they used to have at blockbuster. So you can date the drive and rotate them . That way you can buy a few drives and use carbon cloner and get everything on a $50 drive. I thought I say diglloyd had a small tote bag with his backups. Maybe there were old VCR boxes and it a VCR tape holder? I bet I have some around will try it. Roger

[Thawley]

Googling "Hot Rod MacBook Pro" lead me to this forum. Great thread.

[Guy Mancuso]

Thanks and welcome.

[aaanorton]

Originally Posted by Lars Vinberg

There are different technologies for the memory used in SSD's. The expensive tech that Intel uses is called SLC, wheras cheaper tech is called MLC which has unimpressive write speed. The drives you see in netbooks are all MLC.

http://geekadviser.com/2008/12/mlc-v...nd-their-uses/

In short, SLC is faster and much more reliable, and has greater lifespan.

Re r/w cycles, it's that many cycles in the same location, so it will last much longer than a hard drive.

I don't mean to be a nudge, but Intel's X25-M drives are MLC SSDs. It is the -E drives that are SLC. Most SSDs on the market now are MLC. As mentioned, OCZ is making some great MLC (and SLC!) SSDs, like their Vertex series. And Intel has just come out with updated X25-Ms using smaller fab which will be better and cheaper!
I've had great success in Mac Pros and MBPs with OCZ Vertex drives. I recommend them highly!

[monza]

The Crucial SSDs are now out too, with much faster writes and larger than the Intel -E drives.

http://bit.ly/BLULp

[Ben Rubinstein]

So the crucials are now the fastest on the market for the price? Had the 'box' speed been at all substantiated?

These are the speeds from the 64GB,
200MB/s READ, 150MB/s WRITE
Is that so incredible, as far as I can see it's only the highest capacity disks that get the faster 250MB/s READ, 200MB/s WRITE speeds and it ain't cheap!

[Guy Mancuso]

That's fast and yes their maybe some new SSD out there that can get those kinds of speed

[dfarkas]

I think my Samsung 256GB SSD drives get about 200MB/s read and 170MB/s write. In hardware-based RAID 0, I'm getting over 300MB/s read and write (sequential). My random 4K speeds aren't as good as the Intel drives, but they are still much, much faster than even the fastest spinning HDD. For video editing and large file processing I was much more concerned with getting high sequential read and write speeds (without the stuttering of older, slower drives).

Either way, these SSDs are wicked fast, with plenty of space to spare. Even with a fair amount of files, the entire CS4 Master Collection, LR, C1, Office 2007, etc. I still have 400GB free space.

I converted a 60MP DNG (from P65+) in LR 2.4 to a 16-bit TIFF in 10 seconds.

I then opened the resulting 346MB TIFF in CS4 in 2.5 seconds.

....On my laptop!!

David

[Guy Mancuso]

These look to be the new Crucial's . Can't seem to locate the Samsungs though

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148319

[Guy Mancuso]

I would go for two 128 gb ones and Raid 0 them . Like to see some reviews on them first though

[monza]

barefeats.com has been using a Crucial SSD in his MBP, he should have a RAID 0 review soon. Easy reading, good info and a very nice guy, known him many years.

[dfarkas]

Originally Posted by Guy Mancuso

These look to be the new Crucial's . Can't seem to locate the Samsungs though

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148319

Guy,

Samsung doesn't sell direct. They only OEM for Dell, Corsair, and OCZ (there might be others, too).

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/p...4&sku=341-9999

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233085

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227449

Obviously, the Dell drives are way, way less at $479 vs. $699 for the Corsair or $849 for the OCZ. They are all the identical Samsung drive, with Samsung controller and Samsung NAND. I was incorrect with my specs. They have 220 MB/s read and 200 MB/s write. I got mine from Dell and they work great.

David

[Guy Mancuso]

Thanks David. These might put a dent into my Intel speeds that I am currently using.

[Guy Mancuso]

My question to myself is replace one drive with a 128 Crucial and leave my other 80gb Intel M in the box for storage. I would be off Raid 0 but these drives are faster overall and as a single would it beat my Raid 0 today. I'm like 70 write for a single drive on the Intel and these are 150 writes. What do you think. Than I can stick my I tunes and actually use that internal as a working /travel drive. Not sure going to the one faster drive would be faster overall than what I have inside now which is two Intel 80gb running on a single drive
Sequential Access - Read: Up to 250MB/s
Sequential Access - Write: Up to 70MB/s

The crucial is running
Sequential Access - Read: Up to 250MB/s
Sequential Access - Write: Up to 190MB/s

[monza]

That's what I'm thinking...a single SSD with one of the newer models with faster writes, instead of RAID. Saves quite a bit, no bracket to buy, and leave the optical as-is.

[Guy Mancuso]

Yea for me i could keep the bracket in and one of the Intel 80gb that is there and use for the Raw files when traveling and also free up 16gb of space and put my Itunes on it. Even the 128gb new SSD would be plenty big enough for me . I store nothing on my OS drive just work on the very current job than move it off the OS immediately.

Obviously going to a single drive also takes the risk from Raid 0. Even Raiding these new drives you may still run into the Processor bottleneck anyway and not gain much by Raiding them. The write times have really improved here

[dfarkas]

Originally Posted by Guy Mancuso

Yea for me i could keep the bracket in and one of the Intel 80gb that is there and use for the Raw files when traveling and also free up 16gb of space and put my Itunes on it. Even the 128gb new SSD would be plenty big enough for me . I store nothing on my OS drive just work on the very current job than move it off the OS immediately.

Obviously going to a single drive also takes the risk from Raid 0. Even Raiding these new drives you may still run into the Processor bottleneck anyway and not gain much by Raiding them. The write times have really improved here

Don't underestimate the importance of Intel's (significant) advantage in random 4K write speed. Intel leads the pack by a wide margin in that regard. If the 320GB X-25M G2s had been available when I was shopping, I probably would have gotten two of those. I am certainly very, very happy with the Samsung SSDs , but you may want to keep your current setup if it is working for you.

What about using an addtional Samsung or Crucial SSD in an external enclosure through Firewire 800 or eSATA? Then you could use that to put all your working files in. eSATA would be faster, but doesn't offer power like USB or Firewire does. for a MBP, I think you need an ExpressCard adapter for eSATA. On the new mid-2009 MBP, there are no ExpressCard slots anymore, right? Kind of sucks. (I'm using a Delkin ExpressCard 54 CF reader that uses the PCI-Express bus and gets about 50MB/s download and sits inside my laptop) Why won't Apple at least give its users an eSATA port? It is about the same size as USB or DisplayPort. Apple giveth, Apple taketh away....

And, I don't see very much risk with RAID 0 on solid state. When (in X years) the drives fail, they fail on a write cycle. But, they should still remain readable. How much CPU overhead does RAID take on OSX? My laptop has harware BIOS-controlled RAID so there is no CPU overhead involved and seperate cache on the RAID-controller. Sudden power failure isn't really a problem on laptops like it is in desktops since we use battery and have auto-sleep mode when power is getting low.

Slightly off-topic, but really, this whole post gets me thinking that Apple needs to make a true powerhouse mobile workstation. They need quad core, more RAM, better video, more ports (eSATA, ExpressCard, etc) with a high-gamut LCD and hardware RAID. The Mac Pro is a smoking machine. Why not offer that kind of power in a laptop config? Or is it another case of form over function?

Or, if you are willing to give up some of that form....

David

[Guy Mancuso]

The quad core David is the real ticket Apple needs to address . I have a E-sata going through the express port and 8gbs of ram which is very respectable but the issue is the cores and they need to address that especially for us C1 users that is core dependent. Now with Snow Leopard coming I am not sure what that will bring to the table and reported there is a performance boost so I think the best thing for Mac users at the moment is hold on wait for Snow leopard than come back and address the SSD.

But I certainly agree they need a REAL Pro laptop that us pigs really need

[Ben Rubinstein]

I'm just wondering what would give me the bigger overall boost, upgrading from Core 2 Duo to Core 2 Quad or SSD's. I've already got 8GB Ram and don't need any more. Methinks the SSD's will make the bigger difference.

[monza]

Oops, the Dell/Samsungs went up from $479 to $789 in the last day...

[woodyspedden]

Originally Posted by Guy Mancuso

The quad core David is the real ticket Apple needs to address . I have a E-sata going through the express port and 8gbs of ram which is very respectable but the issue is the cores and they need to address that especially for us C1 users that is core dependent. Now with Snow Leopard coming I am not sure what that will bring to the table and reported there is a performance boost so I think the best thing for Mac users at the moment is hold on wait for Snow leopard than come back and address the SSD.

But I certainly agree they need a REAL Pro laptop that us pigs really need

Guy

Problem for us C1 users is that Aperture is an Apple owned product so I don't think Apple cares much about what happens to C1

woody

[jjlphoto]

Thanks a lot Guy. First you convince me to get a bunch of German glass, now this? I can't keep up

Love this Hot Rodding post! For in-the-field back up, I was considering abandoning the idea of using the laptop's discarded HD in a case, and just a using an ExpressCard SSD in the laptops PCI slot? Anyone try that?

[jjlphoto]

Originally Posted by Ben Rubinstein

I'm just wondering what would give me the bigger overall boost, upgrading from Core 2 Duo to Core 2 Quad or SSD's. I've already got 8GB Ram and don't need any more. Methinks the SSD's will make the bigger difference.

With the 'welded in' battery, anything that uses less juice is a winner in my book.

[Ben Rubinstein]

Can you elaborate for me please Jjlphoto? Pardon my lack of knowledge in this field.

[jjlphoto]

The new units do not allow for you to keep a spare 'charged' battery on hand. You have to make the unit last until you get back to some power to re-charge. Eliminating any excess drain is good, such as the power consumption of a conventional spinning hard drive with its moving armature.

[Guy Mancuso]

Originally Posted by woodyspedden

Guy

Problem for us C1 users is that Aperture is an Apple owned product so I don't think Apple cares much about what happens to C1

woody

But they would still need more cores even for Final Cut Pro. Apple needs to up the game here with more cores. The system would simply run faster like a MacPro with more cores

[monza]

Installed a Crucial SSD 128GB ($299) in my 4GB MBP 2.53Ghz Unibody (mid-09.)

This is not Guy's full-on RAID 0, it's just a single drive.

Check it out. Look how fast the dock fills up! Insane...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD9FeAADuRI

[Guy Mancuso]

Pretty cool. I love doing that