Category Archives: OS X

Samsung 830 Series 256GB SSD drive

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It’s been a month since installing the Samsung 830 Series 256GB SSD drive in my Macbook Pro 15” MC721LL/A (early 2011).

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It doesn’t come with a 3.5” adapter. It’s a simple package with a CD. Upgrading is simple with the new Macbook Pros. I never use the CDs it comes with since I just format my computer and start from scratch. Most, if not all my important files are in the cloud and can easily be restored when needed.

Overall I’m very pleased with the performance. It’s a huge improvement from the traditional hard drive but… it replaced my old Kingston SSD drive. I don’t see much improvement between the SSD drives. I guess there isn’t much difference between SATAII and SATAIII. My MBP uses SATAIII which is one reason why I upgraded. Another reason is that the Kingston only had 96GB to begin with and it was filling up fast. Here is the benchmark I ran with the the Samsung 830 drive. Unfortunately, I can’t find the benchmark I ran with the Kingston SSD.

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Opening an Apple Mac Mini Mid 2007 MB138LL/A

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I wanted to upgrade my old Mac Mini Mid 2007 MB138LL/A. Here’s what I did. Remember that I will not be responsible for any damage to your equipment.

With most Apple computers, opening them can be trivial. The trick to opening this one is using a putty knife. There are no screws holding the case to the computer/motherboard.

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There shouldn’t be any hidden wires connecting the case and the computer itself. Once you have the case off, here’s what you’ll see.

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You will notice that the DVDRW drive is at the top, while the hard drive is right underneath. At this point, you’ll probably not see the ram. It’s underneath the hard drive. You have to remove some screws to get access to these components. You should note that there is a wire that needs to be disconnected before removing the screws.

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In the front view of the above picture, please note A. This is the wire that needs to be disconnected.

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You will need to unclip the piece marked A to gain access to one of the screws.

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The picture above shows you where each of the 4 screws are. They are black with one of them being longer than the other 3. The labels A, B, C, and D shows where the screws are located. D is the longest of the 4 screws. E just shows you I have removed the component to get access to screw C.

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Keep in mind, there is a ribbon connecting the mid layer you are about to lift and the motherboard. This is to the back of the Mac Mini. The SATA ports are joined to the motherboard by a card. Slowly lift up keeping the 2 components I just mentioned. Figure A is the ram location. You can install 2x DDR2 667. Up to 2GB (2x 1GB) are supported but 3GB can be supported according to Wikipedia. These are not desktop size ram, they are laptop size – SODIMM. Figure B is the hard drive. It is a 2.5” size. According to Wikipedia, it’s a SATA2 port that supports up to 3Gbps but it has been throttled down to 1.5Gbps.

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Figure A is the ribbon I was referring to above. You can remove it but remove the end that’s attached behind the DVDRW drive. It is a little pain to connect it back but it will make moving things around easier. It’s up to you but check out how it’s connected first so you know how to put it back later.

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Above is a picture with a closer look of the SATA card that connects the hard drive and optical drive to the motherboard. Figure A connects to Figure B. So be aware of that when lifting the middle piece off the motherboard. You should lift up.

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The 2 pictures above I labeled where the 4 screws are located to remove the hard drive. It’s fairly easy to remove from the SATA connection after the screws have been removed but putting the new hard drive can be more of a challenge. There’s a gap between the hard drive and DVDRW drive so you can’t rest the hard drive on the optical drive while connecting it to the SATA port.

If you’ve ever opened up a Macbook Pro or other laptops, you will notice the ram is place in a similar fashion. There are 2 clips on the side. Once you unclip the ram, it will pop up. The ram chips are stacked on top of each other, with their own clips.

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Above is another view of the motherboard.

That should cover how to replace the hard drive and ram for the Mac Mini. Before putting the case back, I would suggest turning it on and ensuring your new components are recognize. Just be careful when you have it running to not touch any of the components as you may damage it. Apple may have nice designs but the price of it is the difficulty of upgrading.

Optibay Kit from Maxupgrades.com

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I just installed the optibay kit from Maxupgrades.com on my Macbook Pro (MC723LL). The kit cost $89 with the USB enclosure. I called them up before ordering and spoke with one of the sales people for almost half an hour. He knew a great deal about Apple products and he says that he’s one of the machinist that builds the kits. He guarantees that they are aluminum. I gave them a chance and was surprised at the level of quality and shipping/packaging. The package is well wrapped and padded. The parts were in anti-static bags and on top of the that, the tools were included as well as the screwdriver was magnetized to help with assembly. It didn’t come with any instructions on how to remove the optical drive. I tried to look on Youtube but didn’t find what I needed. I have opened other Macs before without any guide. A good rule of thumb is to go slow and be careful. I figured I’ll give this a shot. I took roughly 30 minutes for the whole install so it wasn’t as bad as open up an iMac.

There were 3 screws I didn’t use because the holes didn’t line up. It’s on the SATA adapter to be screwed on the aluminum bracket. It was either screwing the adapter and not having the SATA connectors fully plugged in or not screw it on and have the SATA connectors fully plugged in. I chose the latter. It’s fairly secure even without the screws. Here are some pictures during the unboxing.

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I also made a video during the installation.

It was the PRAM

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Last week I bought another Kingston 96GB SSD drive from Newegg. This was my second SSD from Kingston. I’ve had a great experience with the first one so I figured why not get another, plus the price was good… pretty much $1 per GB.

Anyway, I had a nightmare getting this installed on my new 2011 MBP 15″. First I tried to clone the old HDD with the new SSD using the Acronis utility software that came with my first SSD. That didn’t work because it didn’t recognize the OS X partition. Then I tried to use Disk Utility to do a restore. Found out it won’t work because the original drive is 500GB while the SSD is only 96GB. So I get an error that says it won’t work because there’s not enough room. Then I tried to do a clean install onto the SSD after I installed it on my MBP, I kept getting an error.

It reminds of the errors I’d get using Windows. You know, the short and sweet ones that don’t explain anything.

The next thing I did was I put the SSD into a USB enclosure then plugged it into my iMac. I was able to install Lion 10.7 on there so that tells me the DVD isn’t messed up and the SSD drive is working. With Lion finally installed, I installed the SSD back on my MBP and it ran weird and slow. I tried to do a clean install again, and again the error (There was a problem installing “Mac OS X”. Try reinstalling.).

I finally Googled the error and found people resetting their PRAM (hold Option+Command+P+R while your Mac boots up… let go once it restarts). This fixed the issue and I was able to do a clean install… finally.

I have installed Lion using a DVD and a pen drive. The DVD install took 30-40 minutes while the USB pen drive took 1.5 hours. It’s weird but that’s what I got. Maybe my pen drive sucks. My guess was the USB install would’ve been quicker but I was wrong.

Now my 2nd Gen i7 with 8GB of ram is using SSD (SATA2 – 3Gbps). It’s running great. Once the SATA3 SSDs become more affordable, I may upgrade again.

 

 

 

My new iMac 27″ i7 MC814LL

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My work was kind enough to replace my aging 24″ iMac (MA456LL) with a new 27″ iMac (MC814LL). It’s a huge difference, not just screen size but performance as well. I’m coming from a Core 2 Duo processor to Intel’s i7 Quad Core Sandy Bridge. This has Hyper Threading so I get up to 8 threads. It’s very nice and fast. I’ve been able to run multiple Virtualbox VMs without slowing down.

This is the latest version of the Apple iMac line (Spring 2011) and comes with 2 Thunderbolt ports – which I don’t have any compatible devices to play with. The have removed support for Firewire 400 which I thought was not a good move. I still have devices using that port. I can still use it with a Firewire 400 to 800 cable. They should have at least added USB3.0 support but of course Apple doesn’t like using mainstream ports (also no support for eSATA or Bluray). Oh well, that’s Apple for you. I also have to replace my mini DV cable if I want to use a secondary monitor. An SDHC card reader available on the right side. This is a great addition, consider my Macbook Pro 13″ has it, it’s another way to transfer files between devices. It’s also convenient pulling images off my camera if needed.

 

Here’s a screenshot of the About this Mac.

As you can see, it comes with an 8GB ram running at 1333. My desktop at home (PC clone) with the same CPU is running 16GB at 1600MHz. I’m not sure if it will recognize the 1600MHz, but the great thing about my desktop at home is I can overclock the ram and CPU if i choose to – which is one of the limitations of Apple hardware.

Here is a screenshot of the details on the ram. As you can see, there are 4 total slots and can go as high as 16GB.

This iMac comes with an AMD Radeon 6970M 1GB video card. Based on the System Profiler, it’s running on the x16 slot and has a maximum resolution of 2560×1440. As with all iMac design, it isn’t something that can be replaced and upgraded. Notice the “M” on the model number. That stands for Mobile which is the same type of card you’ll find on laptops and is embedded on the motherboard.

The iMac is configured to have a 1TB hard drive. It’s a Western Digital 7200RPM. Based on the model number it’s a Caviar Black with 32MB cache. Not bad at all. The System Profiler also reveals that  the max speed supported is 6Gbps – so it can use SATAIII drives. The drive it currently has is SATAII – 3Gbps.

I don’t know much about the the Thunderbolt ports nor do I have any devices I can plug in it. So I’ll just post the screenshot of its section in the System Profiler.

 

Using Geekbench I got a score of 11809. The free version only runs in 32bit. I’m not sure if there’s a big difference if it’s running in 64bit. You can check the details here… http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/426677. I also ran Geekbench on my old iMac and got a score of 3210. It’s almost 4x faster but keep in mind, it’s a Core 2 Duo with no Hyper Threading and 4GB ram plus it’s slower ram. You can check out the details here… http://browse.geekbench.ca/geekbench2/view/426690.