I went looking to see what the current price for an Apple SSD was.

I found them as configurable items for purchase with a laptop. Just not as a individually purchasable item.

I believe they've always been only available as a custom build option for a new machine.

As long as you have a Unibody Macbook Pro, any normal 2.5 inch SSD should be pretty easy to put in yourself. If you have an older system, it's doable, but requires a bit more work to get to where the HDD is.

Wouldn't you save a good amount of money sourcing an SSD yourself anyway? I would never buy parts like this from the manufacturer (it has nothing to do with my feelings about Apple ).

It depends on the part. Since Apple doesn't sell the SSDs independently, it's hard to say exactly which way would be best here. For the last video card upgrade I did on the Mac Pro, I went through Apple direct, as their cost wasn't too far off other similar cards on the market. Buying through them meant my warranty is still honored from one source on anything in the system. Plus, it was the only variant of this video card with a mini displayport connector on it, handy for the (finally released) 27 inch monitor I bought.

Mine is a 2009 model. And I'm pretty sure when I looked, shortly after the topic of SSD's became hot. That apple was selling them as accessories then.

For instance they do offer SSD's for Mac Pro desktops as an accessory.

Here's the howto for the 15 inch 2009 MacBook Pro:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Insta...lacement/1715/1

Another option is to put an SSD in place of the optical drive, leaving the stock HDD in place. I'm considering going this route, as the optical drive is near useless to me these days. MCE sells a mounting kit that includes an enclosure to make the internal optical drive an external USB one instead.
http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

I've never seen Apple sell the SSDs standalone, but from what I understand, they source theirs from Toshiba.

More generic drive caddy at a bit less than half the price of the MCETech one ($42): http://newmodeus.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=220

The MCETech does currently come with a free USB enclosure to relocate your optical drive.

If you're OK with a bunch of wires and tape holding an SSD in place, you can actually just make a cable for around $10: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=680228

I've been meaning to do this mod since I bought my unibody MBP 17", just haven't had the opportunity to commit to it yet - mainly due to some disappointment with SSDs available.

Hey Tom, might you be able to make the forum allow searching for three-character words? You can't search for "SSD" for example.

This is the thread I was looking for and I couldn't remember what it was about other than SSD, luckily I remembered that I'd probably written the word "optical" at least once.

Optical drive bay HDD caddy for $12 shipped:

http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trk...-All-Categories (may need some modifications to fit into various MacBooks)

I just bought one of these and will report back once I've also bought an SSD and new hDD to install with it.

The searches were set to use "MySQL's Full-Text Search", and that seems to be limiting it. I tried switching to the "UBBThreads Internal" search feature, and it made the site not respond due to I/O wait skyrocketing.

I'll have to dig deeper to see what needs to change to let MySQL full-text search work with 3 character words.

Alter the ft_min_word_len system variable and rebuild your indexes.

I seem to recall this TLW problem from years ago. Including TLW's caused the search index to balloon beyond usability.

edit TLRTLW

BTW, is there a new consensus for what the best balanced SSD is right now? In terms of cost, performance and longevity.

The HDD I want to pick up is the 500GB Seagate Momentus XT (it has some flash in it, making it a "hybrid") - I'd be using that for general storage along with a dedicated SSD for boot and apps.

If you can wait just a little bit longer, Intel has a refresh planned of most of their products sometime soonish (scheduled for Q4 2010). I've been very pleased with the Intel ones both at home and work.

I can probably install the new HDD to immediately give me more space and then add the SSD in a couple of months.

According to Mark Lord, at the moment it is this one.

I have decided that I am not going to switch over to an SSD for my system drive after all, at least not until the state of the art reaches the point where reliability is acceptable. If I can believe the reviews, somewhere around 10-20% of them arrive either DOA or fail catastrophically within a few weeks. The manufacturers appear to be very accommodating as far as replacing the failed drives in a timely fashion, but even if they didn't, the monetary expense is the least of the costs of a failed system drive. (I have a lot of software to reinstall and configure.)

tanstaafl.

I keep a mirror backup of my MBP just for such an occasion. Time Machine automated backups and a manual mirror every few weeks. I've had to use the backup to pull back a few files, but, knock on wood, with my current HDD I haven't had any issues.

I think I must now withdraw that recommendation. I bought one (very very similar innards) for a client system (yesterday), and it died (permanently) while doing the install. There are other reports of the same sudden death with that brand, controller, and firmware revision.

Ugh. These drives were rock solid with older firmware.

So.. Intel G2 drives. Faster than mechanical media, significantly slower than the drive above, but very likely to have better engineered firmware inside.

Cheers

No one ever got fired for buying IBMIntel

My next SSD will be an Intel one as I don't trust OCZ at all now. The Vertex drive I've got still has weird errors and issues because of buggy firmware updates. According to OCZ, it should be fine and if I've got any problems then I should do a secure erase of the entire drive. That is their response to everything...

The customer reviews of the Intel 25-M G2 drives are much more favorable than for the OCZ drives in terms of the ratio of satisfied/unhappy purchasers.

tanstaafl.

My Vertex died after a couple months. They were an amazing couple of months, though. Maybe I'll try reformatting it and salvaging it again (like for the 4th time).

I bought a Kingston V-Series V+ in late February and this has worked very good. Seems to be quite fast, but I don't have any other SSDs to compare with (other than the SSDs in my Eee).

Stig

I'll have to double check on Monday, but I'm pretty certain all the Intel SSDs deployed at work have been flawless so far, without a single problem. I think we have about 40-50 in heavy use, with mine being the oldest. After nearly a year of either local or remote compiles, along with heavy game patch generation, the drive is still running strong and performing well.

While the Intel ones are a little slower then the competition, they do tend to present a more unified performance level. Intel seems to trade a bit of high end single stream read/write speed to ensure the 4k read/write side doesn't slow down too much.

The Intel drives are smaller and slower (even for 4KB writes) than the competition at most price points. Anecdotal evidence suggests they may also be much more reliable, but that is tricky for us end users to judge correctly.

Probably, though.

I replaced the b0rked 90GB OCZ SSD with a 128GB Kingston V-Series (2010) SSD (aka. Toshiba aka JMicron) drive today and installed everything without a hitch.

Cheers

I always forget how fast the SSD industry moves, and probably should have added "when we tested". While it was a little under a year ago, things keep moving quickly, and some other vendors made major leaps in the previously dismal 4k performance over the past year.

Actually, in fairness, the Intel drives have probably still got an edge over the best of the others for tiny I/O performance.

Cheers

I've installed the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive in my MacBook Pro and so far I'm really impressed with the performance. This drive has 4GB of flash in addition to 500MB of regular magnetic storage. It automatically fills the flash with sectors that are used most often, such as files for booting, etc.

The net and real-world results for me seem to be quite improved boot and login times, and near-instant launching of apps I always have open, like Path Finder, Safari, Mail and Evernote. It's especially impressive for Mail and Safari which I don't have starting up automatically and may quite and restart a few times per week.

So now I'm going to wait for the new round of SSD and then install a 128GB model as a new boot drive, with the Seagate becoming my secondary and primarily data drive.

I was meaning to comment on this, as I too grabbed one of these drives last weekend. Since Frys carried them, I figured I could try it, and return it if it didn't work out. After having it installed for 2 hours, it stayed in the keeper status. It was a huge upgrade over the stock hard drive, and was only a little bit behind my Intel 40GB SSD when loading a demanding game. The old stock drive was twice as slow as the Momentus XT with the same test, even when I had the drive in my Mac Pro instead of the MacBook Pro. Once I was done testing, I ended up cloning the old drive to the new. Conveniently they were the exact same size down to the byte, so I opted for the exact clone option, instead of having to muck with cloning both an OS X and Windows partition.

A friend of mine saw the difference, and decided to go with it for his desktop instead of going for the pricier Velociraptor or even pricier SSD. This drive should hold us both over until SSDs start coming down even more.

Oh, and Mark, ended up using your recommendation of just using "cp" to clone the disk. The downside (on OS X at least) is sending a kill -INFO to cp doesn't produce a useful status indicator. dd when sent a kill -INFO will show the block it's currently on and overall stats making it a little easier to estimate time remaining. Took 29 hours to clone 500GB, mostly due to the slow SATA->USB enclosure I had the old drive in.