I have a late 2008 15″ MacBook Pro – the first of the unibody models. It’s got 4GB RAM, and it’s an amazing machine.  But like anything I’ve had for more than a year, it’s starting to feel a little slower than I remember. A fresh installation of Leopard always helps, and although defragging hard drives is not something that is often required on a mac, large virtual machine files in the 40-60GB range can mess with the hard drive a bit, and defragging helps this.

This post applies to those people with an ExpressCard slot on a fairly new machine. This will work for all unibody models, as well as some models released prior to that. New MacBook Pro machines, as of summer 2009, have had their ExpressCard slots replaced with SD card readers, with the exception of the 17″ (surfboard) model.

Like 90% of MacBook Pro users, I’ve never used my ExpressCard Slot for anything, and I’ve kept my eye on the market for useful things to put in there. There have always been flash drives made for ExpressCard slots, but the access times have been too slow to make them very useful. Then along came the Wintec Filemate 48GB ExpressCard drive (currently $140 from Tiger Direct).  It has access speeds of 65MB/s for write, and 115MB/s read – fast enough to use as a boot disk, and to handle file operations faster than the fastest hard disks available for the MacBook Pro.

I’ve read lots of reviews of this device, and people seem to have different opinions about the best way to use this fast drive.  Some people suggest that it should be used as a scratch disk for Photoshop, or other programs that do a lot of reading/writing to the HD. A few others have used it as a boot drive for Leopard. That’s what I wanted to try.

I have to say that the first drive I ordered was a dud. It worked as a USB drive (the drive actually can be plugged in via USB, which is immensely helpful) and I even installed Leopard on it via USB, and booted from it. It was very fast, even on a USB interface, but when in the ExpressCard slot, the machine froze when transferring any files larger than a few megs. Had to exchange it. When the new one came, I was all ready.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Partitioned my 250GB drive into 50GB and 200GB partitions, with my old version of Snow Leopard on the 200GB Partition, and an Empty 50GB partition to be used later.
2. Backed up everything via Time Machine, and double backed up my important files to a firewire drive.
3. Installed Snow Leopard to the ExpressCard Drive, making sure to exclude extra language files and printer drivers.
4. Booted into the new instance and ran software update a couple of times. At this point you can migrate your settings from your old system via Time Machine or your hard drive, but I decided to start fresh with a smaller set of applications, and moved my settings over manually and selectively.
5. Install all your applications. I was able to fit all my applications on the new drive for optimum performance, but if you use some huge apps, you may need to install some on your old hard drive.  As you add new applications, you can put them in the default “Applications” directory, or in an applications directory on your old hard drive.
6. Move your user directory. You don’t need to store all your music and videos on your solid state drive. Instructions here.
7. Trim the fat. I used Monolingual and xSlimmer to remove extra language files from installed applications and to remove PowerPC binaries (do this at your own risk!). Surprisingly, this reduces the size of native Apple applications significantly – sometimes 70%. Saved over 3GB doing this.
8. Start dumping redundant files on the 200GB drive, removing system files and everything you don’t need. Do this carefully!  Organize your drive well. Leave your user directory intact, as it is still your main user directory.  I moved my web root over as well (copy your web root, and update Apache to point to it – if you’re into that sort of thing).

At this point, I had used 20GB on my solid state drive, leaving me almost 30GB for new apps. I flirted with the idea of putting a Parallels virtual machine file on the SSD, but I’m not sure I want to fill another 15-20 GB there, and I’m not sure the speed improvements would be worth it. I’m going to try it briefly, and I’ll update this post if it’s worth doing.

The next steps are optional, but since this is a new way of doing things, I wasn’t sure I was ready to trust the drive completely.  I created the 50GB partition so I could have a clone of the drive on my old HD. This way, if the card fails one day, I won’t be screwed. I cloned the drive using Carbon Copy Cloner and I now have an exact copy of my initial installation. You may want to do this every so often, so your clone is up to date. Point your user directory to your other partition for consistency, and you should be able to boot into either one seamlessly.  If you want to free up that 50GB eventually, you can put a boot drive on a firewire or USB drive for safety.

If you want to get all hard core about it, you could even buy multiple ExpressCard drives, and swap between them, loading Windows or Linux on the others.

And now for the results

This thing screams. Seriously. You would not believe how fast this machine is, and it was already a very fast machine.  Safari opens instantly. It was quick before, but now it opens in about 100ms. Most native apps are the same – opening in less than a second. Photoshop opens in four seconds – practically blew my mind.  I’m not going to bother running benchmarks, since those depend so much on other factors, and I’m satisfied that the machine is faster, and significantly so.

I’m not counting on much as far as battery life improvements, since the hard drive will still be doing a lot of the work, but I do notice that the drive does not spin up much at all, and I like the silence.