Yesterday Mitchell posted a first look at his new 13″ MacBook Pro. In his terrific overview he showed a few pictures of his swapping out the installed drive for a mammoth 500GB drive. As luck would have it the 120GB Solid State Drive I ordered from NewEgg earlier in the week arrived while I was reading it. As a result, the iPhone 3G S that is “Out for Delivery” isn’t the only piece of “zipper” Apple Hardware I’ll be enjoying.
Instead of taking some shots of the install I figured I would grab my Flip UltraHD and film it. So here, for your viewing pleasure is the transition of my AWESOME MacBook Pro into the Uber-Quiet Awesome MacBook Pro.
I had hoped to simply clone the drive prior to the swap so that I could merely turn it on after the install was finished but something went wrong. Instead I did things the “old fashioned way”. I formatted the drive, used the install disk to install Leapard and then restored the image from a Time Machine backup. It took some time but went smoothly. Then, since the new drive is far smaller than any I have used in recent memory, I set out to trip the fat. Using XSlimmer I pulled all the code for PowerPcs from the installed applications. That immediately saved me 4GB of space. I trashed a lot of pictures that are both on the notebook and my iMac since I don’t REALLY need them with me all the time. Finally I removed some programs I keep on my computers “just in case” but never use. This ended up with me having about 75GB of free space. With iDism and SugarSync storage, and the option to carry an SD card or two if need be.
I must say I am amazed by the speed of the SSD and I LOVE!!! how quiet it is. Out the gate this 13″, which has a 2.53 GHz processor and 4GB of RAM was a powerful machine. With the addition of the new drive it is wicked quick!