Speeeeeeed increase ? anyone ?

We all know the problem with speed, we never have enough of it.
Well at least it’s always nice to have more.
At the moment I’m using an end 2008 Macpro 8 Core and I was planning on upgrading this year to the 12 Core but to be honest when I saw the price and when I realized that I actually don’t really need it that much I decided to see what we can do with the Macpro we are using now.
The first upgrade was the videocard, in came the ATI 5770 and out went the 3870, I love to use 3 screens so I could now also loose the original ATI card. The speed increase is noticeable but not spectaculair (as expected), the main thing I’m happy with is that I can now use my preview monitor again in Final Cut pro the way it was before I by accident switched around my videocards and never got the right monitor working again after that, according to Apple it could have never worked in the first place (but it did for over a year :D)

But my search was not over and the next upgrade REALLY makes a difference…

As some of you might know, my wifes owns a PC store and she sells also Mac’s of course.
She pointed me towards a new Seagate drive that combined SSD memory with a conventional very fast 7200rpm/32mb harddrive. In short the drive uses 4GB NAND memory and combines that with the harddrive. The fun thing with this is that it’s much cheaper than SSD memory (try to pay for a 500GB SSD drive….. 🙁 ) and it promises to be much faster than the fastest Raptor 10.000rpm drive……

Well we of course had to test that one 🙂

I ordered two drives, one for my MPB and one for the Macpro.
Changing drives in the MPG is a breeze, total time app 5 minutes. At first you won’t notice a lot, the first bootup actually is always a lot slower than with the original drive (I did notice that before), but the second bootup was really a lot faster, I run a lot of programs and on the MBP we went from 1:46 tot 1:15 boottime. On the MacPro the difference was from 1:22 to 50 seconds, I did not test my bootcamp speed increase but it looks like windows has an enormous boost, you still can see the Windows XP bootscreen (yeah I still run XP for the little things I do) but it boots like crazy now. If I have to guess I would say at least twice as fast, still a bit puzzled why windows would boot faster than MacOs but I didn’t time windows boot before. So that looks promising, however the real difference is noticeable when working in the programs you normally use, lets say it’s like getting a slap in the face (explaining the image at the top), it’s wickedly fast. I know that SSD is even faster but again try to buy SSD 500GB for 120.00 euros.

So if you are looking for an easy way to upgrade your HDD in a MBP or Macpro (or PC) I can really advise to buy the Seagate Momentum XT drives, it will speed up your work considerably.

A small tip
If you are using just MacOs on your boot drive it’s very easy to change drives.
Connect an external drive enclosure like the sharkoon and plug your drive into it, use a program like Carbon Copy (it’s free) and just clone the drive. Change the drive and voila, everything works. (Remember the first bootup is incredibly slow).

If like me you are also using bootcamp, it’s a bit more difficult and I’ve seen a lot of tips/tricks on it online but they all include many different steps and I decided to try it myself differently, and it worked.

1.
Format the new drive, and make a partition exactly the same size as the original bootcamp.

2.
Use winclone to make an image of your bootcamp partition. I placed it on the desktop.

3.
Clone the boot partition with Carbon Copy.

4.
Reboot.

5.
Restore image from winclone.

6.
Done.

It’s really that simple.
One last tip, always save your original harddrive for a few weeks, at least until you have confidence everything works.
So if you want more speed….. here’s a cheap solution.

Any tips, suggestions or experiences are welcome.