SCO0224 - Solid State Drives & OptiBay [Members Show]

It's well established that Solid State Drives offer incredible performance over traditional hard drives. Cool running and with no moving parts, an SSD drive can significantly boost any computers performance, turning your previously adequate laptop or desktop machine into a screaming powerhouse. Add in silent running, low heat generation and increased reliability, SSDs can make an enormous difference to your day to day computing experience.

SSDs are now becoming mainstream with major manufacturers and vendors supplying SSDs in standard 2.5" drive enclosures for simple installation in to a variety of machines. Apple has been installing SSDs in the MacBook Air since its launch and now has build to order SSD options for the MacBook Pro.

The performance benefits of SSDs do come at a price, however. The higher capacity SSDs are expensive with 256GB SSDS commanding a price of $600 to $800 but these prices will fall significantly over the next year or two.

This weeks show introduces you to SSDs and explores several options on how you could utilise an SSD in your laptop, cost effectively.

If you can afford the higher capacity SSDs, great, but I take a look at how you might utilise a smaller, and consequently cheaper, SSD to gain performance increases, yet enable you to break free from the constraints of a lower capacity drive.

In summary, this weeks Extra members show covers:

• Preparing to replace your Hard Drive
• Backing up to a Voyager Q Docking Station
• Replacing a SATA drive with an SSD Drive in a MacBook Pro
• Installing an SSD Drive in a Mac Pro with MaxConnect
• Removing your Optical Drive
• Adding a second Drive to a Laptop with MCE Optibay
• Moving Your Home Directory to a secondary Drive

This week's show includes live video taking you through all the stages of installing an SSD drive and replacing your MacBook Pro optical drive with an MCETech Optibay to add a second drive to your laptop.

The technique illustrated in this weeks show is to replace your standard high capacity standard drive with a smaller SSD drive to act as a fast boot drive. Using the OptiBay, it's possible to then remove your usually under utilised optical drive, and re-install your standard drive as a secondary drive for your data. The show also includes detailed instructions for moving your Home directory to the secondary drive, so space is not a problem.

The MCE OptiBay also allows you to use standard drives for various RAID options, or booting multiple operating systems as discussed in the show.

Links:
MCETech Optibay
Moving Home Folder BlogPost
TheMacScreenCastGuy Need for Speed Series

Discussions: Forum

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