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    installed ssd into 2009 MBP

    Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by ygohome, Nov 9, 2012.

  1. ygohome

    ygohome Notebook Deity

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    *sorry for this giant wall of text... I went into detail incase I ever needed to repeat these step again. I have it documented for my benefit mostly :) .

    Hi,

    I got a Samsung 830 512GB SSD and wanted to post here how I set it up on my 2009 MBP. The size was overkill, I admit, especially considering that I also have a 500GB HDD in an optibay.

    Previously I had two 500GB HDDs. The main HDD was OS X while the optibay had bootcamp on it all to itself. And being spoiled with all of that space, I decided to get a 512GB SSD to replace the main 500GB HDD. Turns out that I probably would have been fine with a 256GB SSD.

    Here is how I now have it setup.

    The new SSD is in the main drive bay with an OS X partition and a 2nd partition for bootcamp.
    Existing 500GB HDD is still in the optibay and is for my OS X data files: Downloads, Documents, iTunes, Picture folders, etc (I have alot of iTunes media)

    A) Before swapping any drives or doing anything else I made sure that I backed up everything:
    - I made sure that timemachine had recently backed up OS X.
    - Backed up bootcamp from the 2nd HDD using latest Winclone software. Restored the image to a spare drive to be sure that it was a good backup.

    B) Shrink the giant 500GB bootcamp volume. The plan is to move the shrunken volume into a 2nd partition that will be created on the new SSD, freeing up the 500GB optibay HDD for my OS X data volume:
    - Shrink the bootcamp volume from 500GB down to 118GB using Winclone.
    - Back up the shrunken bootcamp via winclone

    C) Move my OS X data files to the optibay HDD:
    - erase and format the entire optibay HDD for Mac OS Extended (journaled) and name it "MACData"
    - from the terminal command line, copy the Documents, Downloads, Pictures, and their subfolders to the new volume that was created on the optibay HDD ("/Volumes/MACData")
    - remove/delete the old folders from the main HDD after they are copied to the optibay HDD.
    - create symbolic links to the new folder locations that are on the optibay HDD (this is done incase any apps try to access the original locations on the main drive)
    - use iTunes advanced preferences to relocate/copy iTunes media to new location on the optibay HDD
    - delete the original iTunes subfolder(s) that were just copied... actually, move to trashcan first, then test that iTunes can still open, close, and find the new media location and movies before finally emptying the trashcan.

    D) Now that the data folders have been relocated to the optibay HDD, back up both OS X volumes via TimeMachine. This timemachine backup will be used later for importing via Setup Manager onto the new SSD when the fresh ML install is performed.

    E) Remove the main HDD and replace it with the new SSD.

    F) Boot from an external OS X USB drive. The original main HDD that was removed in step E could be used for that. I connect the bare HDD to the laptop using a SATA to USB cable. I also keep a copy of the installESD.dmg so that I can reinstall mountain lion as many times as I need to.

    - while booted from the external USB drive, format two partitions on the internal SSD. One for Mac OS Extended (journaled) (approx 350GB partition) and the 2nd partition as MS-DOS FAT (approx 160GB)
    - use installESD.dmg to perform a fresh install of Mountain Lion into the 1st partition of the SSD...

    - during the installation it asks if I want to use Setup Manager to import existing accounts, settings, applications, data from another computer, PC, or TimeMachine.
    - connect the external Time Machine drive to the laptop
    - choose to import the Timemachine volume that was made above in step D to the empty Mac partition on the SSD.

    G) After Setup Manager finishes and Mountain Lion has been installed onto the SSD, disconnect the external usb drive and boot into OS X using the new SSD. The SSD's OS X environment will look exactly* as the HDD did at the end of step C, except that now the Main OS X volume will be 350GB instead of 500GB
    *one exception... I had to reinstall Java 7 from Oracle's website onto the SSD. For some reason Java 7 didn't carry over via the Setup Manager import from Time Machine. Probably because of the 10.8.2 that was applied during the fresh install and that overrode the Oracle Java 7. It took only a minute to download and install Java 7 again from Oracles website. I may notice a few other differences as I continue to use this new setup, but so far that was all I noticed that was different after Setup Manager completed.​


    H) Use Winclone to restore the shrunken bootcamp image that was made in step B into the empty MS-DOS FAT partition that is on the SSD. Winclone automatically enlarges the windows volume image to fill the new 160GB partition. *Note: the first time booting into windows after restoring the bootcamp image via winclone will cause Windows to perform a chkdsk, which is fine.


    Thats it. I now have a very FAST bootcamp windows environment... a very FAST OS X environment and TONS of space to spare. I'm currently only using about 50GB of my 350GB OS X partition that is on the SSD. The rest is on the 2nd HDD in the "/Volumes/MACData" volume (taking up about 200GB of that HDDs 500GB). I think I'll use some of this extra space for creating Oracle database VMs on OEL, or something... who knows. In the bootcamp partition, I'm only using about 80GB of 160gb.



    *EDIT: I forgot to mention that OS X does not recognize non-apple SSDs as supporting TRIM. Samsung makes a great SSD with their 830 lineup, but they do not have very aggressive garbage collection/cleanup. There are a few hacks out there to get OS X to recognize an SSD as supporting TRIM. I've only just installed the SSD and I don't have enough experience to recommend one hack over another, or if it is a good idea at all to do any TRIM hacks.

    But I will tell you what I did... after step H, I immediately made new backups of both bootcamp and OSX (via winclone and Time Machine, and also CCC just to be safe). Then I followed the instructions here: https://gist.github.com/leolimajr/4124375

    Note: another popular hack to enable TRIM is via a friendly application "TRIM Enabler" by Oskar Groth, but I read some things that kindof scared me away from that method: http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/ . So, because of that warning, I decided to follow the instructions in the "gist" link instead of using Groth's TRIM Enabler. TRIM Support now shows as "Yes" in my system info. That doesn't mean it is active though, I don't know of a way to confirm TRIM is active. But at least my SSD is recognized as supporting TRIM where before it wasn't.

    If I ever retire this laptop I know that I can put this SSD into a better machine that can support SATA III and almost double the current read write speed. This SSD in my 2009 MBP SATA II laptop consistently performs just over 190MB/s writes and just over 250MB/s reads when testing with blackmagic. The HDD (Hitachi 7K500 500GB 7200RPM) that is in my optibay writes at approx 88-90MB/s and reads between 88MB/s to 91MB/s with the drive half full... that will slow down as the platters fill up.

    Thanks,

    Ben
     
    ygohome, Nov 9, 2012
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  2. EpicBlob

    EpicBlob Notebook Evangelist

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    Nice setup :)

    I actually have my macbook pro set up almost the exact same way. The main difference is that my bootcamp is installed on a 64gb ssd and os x is on a 120gb ssd. Though I'm about to upgrade my 64gb windows 7 drive to 256gb as there just isn't any space to put anything on my windows side :(
     
    EpicBlob, Nov 13, 2012
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