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.
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 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.
Newegg recently had a good deal on the Kings SVP100S2B/96GR SSD drive. It was $160 with a $50 mail in rebate, plus 10% off. So after everything, I would’ve paid about $1 per GB on an SSD. The advertised read speed is 230MB/s and write speed is 1810MB/s. I’ve always wanted to play with SSD drives but found them to be too expensive. So I jumped on this deal considering the price after rebate. Here are some pics I took during the unboxing.
The kit comes with a USB 2.0 enclosure, brackets, molex to SATA power cable, SATA cable, USB cable, and Acronis True Image software. This is $10 more than the OEM version and the software alone is worth it.
The software is great and easy to use. You just boot off it and you can clone your existing hard drive. At first, I tried to use a USB 3.0 enclosure with the SSD drive. I figured it might be quicker to do the cloning. I kept getting an error so I figured that the USB 3.0 drivers aren’t available or not compatible with the software. I ended up installing the SSD drive internally. I have a few free SATA ports.
After formatting, you will have 89GB of the 96GB available to you. I had to uninstall a lot of stuff just to get it down to that size before I can clone my old drive. Once finished, I was able to clone 86GB of data from a RAID10 to the SSD using SATA2 connection. This process took only 7 minutes. I got curious so I did the same clone: onto a 2.5” drive, 160GB. I’m not sure what if it was a 5400 or 7200 RPM drive. It’s a Hitachi that came with my old MBP 13”. It could be 5400RPM. This process took around 25 minutes.
Using the SSD, my Windows Experience Index of the hard drive improved from 6.1 (RAID10) to 6.9 (SSD).
My boot up time improved from around 68 seconds to 36 seconds. I was left with only 3GB of space left on the hard drive. I ended up using a 1TB drive where I installed applications and stored my documents. Every time I install something or save, I have to remember to do it on the D:\ drive. After a few days of this, I grown tired of it. I really hate it plus because I was installing things on the 1TB drive (non-RAID) it was somewhat slow especially installing more than one software at a time. I’m impatient haha. I missed my RAID10 performance.
So I ended up going back to my old configuration with the RAID10 and installed the 96GB SSD on my MBP 13”. Maybe once the prices have dropped on the larger SSD drives, I can try this again on my desktop and buy 4 of them to set up a RAID 10 or 2 for a RAID0. But right now most of those drives are $2+ per GB.
I don’t regret buying the drive even though I’m not using it on my desktop. The performance of my MBP 13” has improved. So no lost there. Just hope the rebate goes through.
Here some more screen shots doing benchmarks between my RAID10 and the SSD drive. I don’t know what they mean. Hope someone can share some knowledge.
I’m beginning to feel limited while using Apple products. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great platform. But as I start introducing non-Apple devices, I have to go out of my way to get it to work. I started looking into building a PC after 8 years of exclusively using Macs. At first I had my eyes set on an i7 Sandy Bridge but after doing more research and talking with experts, I decided to go with the last generation i7 (LGA1366, Bloomfield). Why?
More motherboards available
Supports faster memory – DDR31600
If I ever want to switch out CPU to the hexacore, I don’t have to switch out motherboards
X58 is a great platform and more stable
It’s been almost a week and I’ve been impressed by some of the tests I’m running. I will go part by part and tell you what I liked and disliked (if applicable).
Corsair Graphite 600T: I decided to spend the extra money getting this tower for several reasons.
I can run the cables in the back side of the tower. There’s plenty of room there.
It is truly tool-less.
Can hold 7 hard drives. It can be reconfigured and move around depending on how you want your airflow to work.
Removable dust filters.
Great quality and durable.
Bottom mounted PSU for liquid cooling solution.
So far, the only thing I don’t like is it doesn’t have a 3.5” slot. I don’t use a floppy drive but most internal memory card readers use this slot. Now I have not only buy the memory card reader but an adapter to make it fit in the 5.25” slot.
Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3: I was going to get the ASUS Sabertooth but the Gigabyte has dual bios where if one were to fail to load, I can use the other and fix the issue.
3 different raid controllers. 6 Intel (SATAII 3Gbps), 2 Gigabyte (SATAII 3Gbps), and 2 Marvell (SATAIII 6Gbps)
Supports triple channel ram up to 24GB
Software to OC is easy to use
One thing I don’t like is it doesn’t have an internal USB port. The front of my tower has a USB3.0 and uses the standard cable. In order for me to use it, I’d have to run the cable to the back of the tower and plug it in.
Intel i7 960 3.2GHz: Currently the fastest processor before going into the extreme hexacore CPU. I have seen people OC this over 4.0GHz so it has great potential. This is a quad core CPU and with Hyper Threading, it becomes 8 cores. I was considering the AMD Phenom II 1100T Black Edition but the benchmarks I’ve seen online were not impressive. Based on those benchmarks, it runs against the Intel i5 Sandy Bridge – not the i7.
Corsair Vengeance 12GB DDR31600: I was going to get a 6GB set but decided to go with the 12GB so that I can max it out in the future. It has XMP and all I needed to do in the BIOS is to set it to Profile 1. Comes with a heat spreader as well. It has a CAS Latency of 9 but seen it run at 8 when OC.
Seagate ST3500641AS: Seagate makes great drives and since I’ve started to use them, I haven’t had one go bad yet (knock on wood). Drives that have died on me are usually Maxtors and Western Digitals. These drives have a 16MB cache and runs at 7200RPM. I bought 4 of these 500GB hard drives and set them up as a RAID10. They run great and my Windows gives it a score of 6.1.
Corsair CMPSU-850TX: I figured 850W should give me enough for current any future mods. Supports SLI and Crossfire. It’s rated at 80Bronze. The only thing I don’t like is it doesn’t support the new ATX v2.3. Corsair just came out with the second version of the PSU. I could’ve waited but I didn’t want to. I figured the changes were not important for my set up and use.
Corsair CWCH70: I could’ve use the stock heatsink that came with my i7 but would need an aftermarket one if I decide to OC it. Rather than figure this out later, I bought it so it’s ready for OC. The install was not as easy as the videos I’ve seen on Youtube. Once installed, I get around 40-52 C on idle or normal use. When doing transcoding (high CPU usage) I don’t go over 65 C. Spending the extra $80 (after rebate) is worth it. It’s compact unlike the first versions of liquid cooling solutions.
EVGA nVidia GTX470SC: It’s not the high end video card in the series but works great. It has CUDA and works great with Adobe software. I have already used Adobe Premiere Elements 9 and exported an HD video to 1080i, 25fps. At the same time, I played Starcraft 2 on ultra settings. The computer remained stable and responsive. I was very impressed. All 8 cores were at 100% and ran around 52-65 C and the video card ran at around 84 C. Starcraft 2 was running at about 52-58FPS. I was able to ALT+Tab between applications, play HD videos off Youtube and watch an HD video off my hard drive.
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit OEM: One of the best, if not the best OS Windows has “created”. I find the 64-bit to be more stable than 32-bit and with 12GB of ram, it’s necessary. I still miss things on OS X but there are things on Windows that don’t exist in my Apple. I love Live Writer. I can blog from my desktop. I wish Apple would create something that works similarly. The built-in Backup/Restore is still unreliable. I’ve had failed backups and failed restores. I decided to keep my iMac and run it side by side. My iMac will contain all of my important documents and use Time Machine to back up. Hopefully one day there will be a back up software/workflow as easy as Time Machine for Windows.
Whoever says using Windows is cheaper than a Mac is wrong. I have spent about the same price building this PC rather than purchasing a new Mac. I have already spent close to $300 on just software, where similar software is unnecessary or already included with a Mac. The hardware cost is about $1500. Unlike my Apple products though, I can switch out parts. To make this possible with Apple hardware, you’d have to purchase a Mac Pro which starts at $2400 and you are still limited to hardware that’s compatible. Regardless, I would have to use both in order to do everything I need to do. I just wish software licenses are easily transferable for both platforms.
Shout out to Jeff of JB Tech Enterprises and his brother Eric for helping me build this machine.
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.
