**SSD in MacBook Pro Mini Guide**

If you're hoping to use SATA6 on your 2011 MBPs for SSD crazy speeds, be aware that only the primary hard drive port (I.e. the normal place) supports SATA6. The secondary port currently used for the SuperDrive only supports SATA3 speeds.

If you plan on using an OptiBay you'll need to put the SATA6 device in the normal bay and any other drive in the secondary.

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A massive speed boost is the shortest way to put it.

SSDs consist of flash memory and so much much faster to read than a spinning hard drive and will severely reduce the IO wait times.
IO waits are arguably the biggest bottleneck to modern computers, that is the CPU waiting for an IO device to read/write. Having an C2D/i5/i7 wont really make much of a difference to the general speed of your computer if most of the time you are waiting for an external device to 'do something' - your CPU will usually be wasting a lot if it's cycles twiddling it's thumbs while your hard drive catches up.

To give you an idea of how fast your Mac will be running with an SSD here is a video uploaded by Feek showing his Vertex 2 SSD in his Mac Pro.

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TRIM is a form of garbage collection. You can click on the wiki for it or you can read the Anandtech article but to keep it short, once an SSD has written to all it's blocks, the drive will slow down write speeds (read speeds are still blazingly fast and unaffected) because of the copy-delete-writeback overhead. TRIM will keep your drive up to speed or as near as it can so you wont have this degrading effect over time.

Unfortunately while windows and linux support TRIM OSX 10.6 doesn't. Lion, OSX 10.7 will support TRIM but it will not be released until this Summer. However, SSDs do not seem to wear as much on OSX as they do windows, in fact some have suggested that there is no need for TRIM support in OSX.

And as Feek has being reassuring us, here are his Xbench results;

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So you've abused your drive so much that even the low level garbage collection and wear levelling algorithms in your SSD couldn't cope eh?

Well with a conventional hard drive you would simply format your drive and reinstall the OS. DO NOT do this with an SSD it wont restore the lost performance. What you need to do is Secure Erase your drive. That is not the same as the option you get under disk utility where 0s are written to every block on your drive, don't do that to an SSD it will make things worse.
Secure ATA-Erase is not an easy thing to do on a Mac, I spend the best part of a day trying to erase my Vertex 2 but finally found a way by borrowing from some other people at MacRumors.
Getting an SSD to be in an unlocked state on a mac is a pain in the backside so if you have a PC you can use to Secure-ATA erase the disk, go for that, but this is the method that worked for me on Mac.

Please note that I take no responsibility if you mess up your expensive SSD or Mac by doing this, okay.

1) If you need to, install bootcamp and flash your SSD to the latest firmware, you can find instructions at your SSD manufacturer's website.

2) Back up all your data, you're going to be wiping your drive as in there is no way to get your data back no matter what recovery programme you use.

3) Burn the latest edition of 32bit Ubuntu or your favourite linux flavour.

4) This is easier for Mac Pros seeing as you have access to the drives and cable from the off, but for MacBook Pros, turn off your machine, unscrew the back, take out the SSD and unplug it. Remove any other storage devices you might have in an optibay (HD/SSD, not the optical drive), you don't want to wipe that by accident.

5) Pull the IO cable to the side so that it's sticking out to the side and place the back to where it should be (gently, don't cut the cables) and turn the mac back over. The cable should be sticking out enough for when you need to hotplug your drive.

6) Put your ubuntu CD in your optical drive and turn on the power, holding option (alt).

7) Press enter at the 'Windows' disc icon and as soon as the screen goes blank (not before) quickly plug in your SSD.

8) Once you've loaded into Ubuntu live CD (I think you have to select try Ubuntu without installing or something to that effect), open a terminal window.

9) Type

Code:

fdisk -l

What you are looking for is the name of your SSD, it should be

Code:

sda

or something similar, it may differ depending on your setup.

10) Type

Code:

hdparm -I /dev/X

where X is the name of your SSD, e.g sda, sdb etc

It should give you

Code:

 Security: 
       Master password revision code = 65534
               supported
       not     enabled
       not     locked
       not     frozen
       not     expired: security count
               supported: enhanced erase
       2min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT. 2min for ENHANCED SECURITY ERASE UNIT.

Your drive should be unfrozen because we hot plugged it, which is the hardest part of Secure Erasing for a Mac. If it's not unfrozen, shut down and try again from Step 6.

11) The next part is found at https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase , which I strongly suggest you follow to the letter.

As a note, after I issued the first lock command for my Vertex 2, I couldn't erase the drive, receiving the 'erasing without a password error' and hdparm stopped responding. All I did was unplug the drive, replug it in and reissued the lock commands. After then it was smooth sailing.

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MacRS4 said:

Important note on 2011 Macbook Pros and SATA6

If you're hoping to use SATA6 on your 2011 MBPs for SSD crazy speeds, be aware that only the primary hard drive port (I.e. the normal place) supports SATA6. The secondary port currently used for the SuperDrive only supports SATA3 speeds.

If you plan on using an OptiBay you'll need to put the SATA6 device in the normal bay and any other drive in the secondary.

Hope that helps.

Click to expand...

If you plan on using an OptiBay you'll need to put the SATA6 device in the normal bay and any other drive in the secondary.

Click to expand...