Tag Archives: apple

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.

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.

 

 

 

Apple TV2 running XBMC

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I finally got my Apple TV generation 2 jailbroken. Why you ask? Well, I am after XBMC so that I can stream files from my DLNA server. I used Pwnage tool. Check out http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/5239805497/tic-tac-toe for more information. Check your firmware version also. When I did it, I was running version 4.2.2 but it was the second version and I had to apply a bundle inside the Pwnage.app file. You can check out http://xbmc.org if you don’t know what XBMC is. Anyway, here’s a video I made. I hope you like it.

ATV2 running XBMC

Roku2 XD

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I just picked up the new Roku2 XD. Best Buy had them in already and thought it would be a great replacement for my Apple TV2. I’ve had my ATV2 since it became available and at first I thought it was a great device. After a few weeks of use, I changed my mind. I don’t rent or purchase movies from the Apple Store and in order to stream my own content I’d have to import the video into iTunes and keep my computer on. This made my NAS box with DLNA capability useless. So I pretty much paid $99 to stream Netflix because that’s all it can do in my household.

Roku came out with their second version, the Roku2. Roku was the other device I thought about getting instead of the ATV2. What made me get the ATV2 over the original Roku was its size and the fact that most of my computers and devices at home are Apple (at that time). I wish I had done more research but oh well. Now that I have the Roku2 XD, it has been great and impressive. For me it has been a better device than the ATV2. Here is a short list of what my Roku2 can do that my ATV2 can’t.

  • Supports 1080p
  • Steams Amazon’s Video on demand
  • You can listen to Pandora
  • You can add channels and they are a lot

The channels are easily added and if you’re familiar with the Wii and its channels, it is set up the same way. You browse and install/add. There is no way to shut off the device. You just have to set the screensaver timer and that’s it. From what I heard the power consumption is very low. According to their website, it uses only 2 watts while streaming video.

Check out my unboxing video and a quick physical comparison to the Apple TV2.