"Must Do's" before/after installing an Intel SSD?

I'm planning on installing an Intel X25-M G2 in my UMBP. Do you guys have any before/after installation tips? Also, the company I purchased the drive from has a very limited return policy, so I want to push the SSD to its limits within the first week. What tasks should I perform? Any signs I should look for indicating a bad drive?

 

Before you install the drive - DO open your wallet nice and wide.

After you install the drive - DO sit back and enjoy the performance increase.


Beyond that, they are pretty much plug and play. There is nothing you need to do. Seriously, nothing. The install is just like any other HD.

 

Update the firmware. I'd do it before you install the OS - Intel does bootable ISO's if I'm not mistaken. We Vertex owners get cobbled-together ISO's by the support forum members

 

Will do, looks like Intel released a new firmware just yesterday - perfect timing .

RogueMonk - LOL @ you. Thanks, for the great suggestions .

 

I'm still waiting for 256GB SSD's to get below $350. Once they do, I'll have a nice new boot drive

 

I was also waiting for a bigger, more affordable drive, but I finally realized that I didn't need anything more then 160GB .

I'm going to install it tonight, super excited .

 

I've been playing around with the idea of installing an 80GB Intel X25-M G2 in my MBP too as the boot drive for speed and moving my 500GB HDD into the optical drive's position for mass storage since I never really use it anyway.

All the reviews on the raw speed of loading apps and booting the system has me drooling:yes: If I still have some spare Christmas bonus money laying around come January, that's what I hope to use it for

edit: and yes...upgrade the firmware before you do anything. Sounds like there are pretty major improvements to be had from reading around the interwebs.

 

The firmware upgrade for the drive is to introduce the TRIM support under Win7 based on what I've been reading. In your -and my- case, that will not benefit you running Snow Leopard. Furthermore, there are some speculations that the new FW disables Intel's built in garbage control (GC), which is the only thing working under Snow Leopard to maintain the drive.

Until more is clear about the new FW, I wouldn't install it. If there is something useful for us Mac owners, you can always apply it in the future. My advice regarding applying FW updates to your SSD (in the future) would be just "wait, especially if something was just released yesterday". So far, there have been few examples, in which the SSD FW updates were pulled back and fixed again to be released 2 weeks later. You dont want to be the one "testing" this in the field.

Other than that, everything is plug and play. If the drive is going to fail, it will fail at the beginning. My first Intel drive suffered from the rare "8MB bug". The installation of Snow Leopard stopped with an error, and the available space of the drive went down to 8MB. The replacement has been flawless and amazingly fast for the last 4 months. You dont need to "push the drive to its limits"; that's a habit from HDDs. If there is something wrong with the controller or one of the chips, it will be obvious from the get go.

Good luck!

 

Good point. I haven't had any 'release and pull' issues, so it didn't occur to me. However given that Intel has to think about XP and Vista owners even taking Macs out of the picture, I very much doubt garbage collection would have been dropped in favour of TRIM, don't you?

 

For the time being, they may take the XP and Vista owners into consideration, but what would be the percentage of people buying SSDs mainly for their laptops and running XP or Vista in 6 months? I would guess the numbers would be minimal compared to Win7 with TRIM support. I know many people who were waiting for the Win7 to be released before buying SSDs, just to have the TRIM support. Of course, Mac is out of the picture now and in the future with the market share (unless Apple and Intel come up with a solution). Besides, the drive works without the GC, just not as well

 

Just thought i'd point out that Garbage Collection (GC) only works in NTFS formatted drives so won't be much use on an HFS+ formatted system such as Snow Leopard

 

Completely untrue.

For those SSDs that support GC (not all do), GC is file-system independent.

 

Fair enough - I was just passing on info that I had gathered over the last few weeks from various sources on the internet prior to purchasing my Intel X25-M SSD (which I haven't even installed as yet) - i retract my previous statement

From what I understand, this is indeed the primary reason for the firmware update. However, various sources I have read also indicate that the firmware improved performance (such as this 26% increase in write performance)

This should be rule of thumb for any software/firmware updates - never update immediately. Wait for others to be the guinea pigs first and if all seems well, take the plunge later.
I for one will be updating my firmware as soon as i've installed the SSD - a potential increase in write speeds is too enticing to turn down.


Finally, back on-topic, don't you have to disable spotlight or something to prevent additional unnecessary writes to the SSD?

 

Here is a good source of SSD tweaks under Mac OSX (albeit not from an Intel forum, but the brand is irrelevant for these tweaks):
Mac OSX Speed Tweaks. Turning off Spotlight and access time recording are among the tweaks mentioned in there.