ok, this video is ever so slightlydifferent to the normal, in that i started doingsomething which i wasn't really planning on putting... actually making a video from but then i changed my, mind and half way through i thought "ah," "why don't i make a video about putting anssd "in a macbook", which is what i'm doing here, as you can see. i own quite an old macbook pro which has never been the fastestthing in the world ever, and of course it occurred to me that a good part of the
delay, in a sense, particularly in booting up as you can see here, it was dead slow at that, and it struck me that a good part of the delay of that could be due to thestraightforward spinning disk that's inside it. and updating, or i say, upgrading one of these with an ssd drive is by all accounts, a very worthwhile, verydecent and quite simple to do, procedure. so i thought, okay i'll have a go at that. what you'll see me doing here
this is the final boot off the oldhard drive as you can see, you know that took-- i'll go back and count it later but quite some time, it was not, by no meanswas it particularly speedy. erm, so i thought ok, ssd drive, affordable, fairly simple,quite easy upgrade to make at least by my standardsi'm not by any means any kind of expert in this, but it was something that i thought was within my capabilities let's give it a go. so, what happened? obviously as the course of this videogoes on you'll see
the many successes and of course outrightfailures of what i was doing but the first thing i did was an attempt to copy the-- just image, image the internal hard drive onto the ssd so that hopefully, you know, itwould just like be a straight swap and it would work straight away. i understand that there is a mode you can bootinto that more or less only starts up a very basic shell and
lets you run up a copy of disk utility. and disk utility does actually apparently let you justclone drives from one to the other as long as the target drive is not smallerthan the one you're copying from it should work, it should be quite ok. so i thought, ok, i'll give that a spin, i'll give that a try. and, as you can see, certainly as you cansee here we're shutting down here and againthis is still from the original old hard drive and you can see-- its slow. it is... well,
there's not really any other word for itother than slow. it's just-- it just takes much too long, it is just painful. so, instead we thought, okay, ssd drive here we come. as you can see this is disc utilityrunning. source is the mac hd, destination is the ssd, so like a straightforward copy. as it turns out that was running forabout three hours. i've saved you a lot of time here by just bringing it in with one minute to go. you can see i stuck the ssd just in a usb3 enclosure, that's one of the seagate ones that i de-shelled the fiveterabyte drive from.
copying on to a 512 gig crucial ssd here, which apparently byall accounts is a quite a good drive, quite well respected, and as it happened to be slightly cheap on one of amazon's lightning deals a coupleweeks ago, i thought ok, let's get one of those. erm, and as you can see here, disk utility looks like it's working. iknow there are other pieces of software on the mac you can get that will do drive imaging likesuper duper or something like that again
people say good things about that aswell but okay well disk utility is built in and i understand it, i've used it before, so let's give it a spin. and that's what happened. of course thequestion is once that's done will the cloned drive actually work? will it evenboot? that's a question which we'll obviouslyfind out the answer to very shortly. i already know the answer, ladies and gentlemen, but i won't tell you just yet to maintain the surprise and delight
of what's happening. but as you can see, the macbook is not difficult to open. it's got 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, 10 screws around the outside. you do needa small screwdriver for it, okay, that's fine, i've got one of those. and i've opened this before because actually it came with four gigs of ram, i put another eight gigs into it. i was actually intending to give it a 16 gig upgrade, but unfortunately in my completely haphazard means of putting the ramin, i managed to put it in in the wrong way around, and then trying to get it
out, i managed to destroy one of the simms by basically screwing all the resistors off the piece of ram with an ill-judged piece of screwdrivering. so, it was not a success, by no means my finest hour. but as you can see here, you know, what's in the macbook is fairly straightforward, you've got youroptical drive, we have your ram, and over there as long as you're verygentle you can you know you can get the drive out of the unit, and you see that it's got just a fairly standard flat flexconnector
connecting into like a fairly normalsata connector. so, theoretically okay, that should be easy to take hard drive out, put ssd in. you can see that the hard drive actually uses four mounting screws and when i say screws, of course they're not proper screws, they are torx screws. all we need to do here is just very gently-- making sure we don't do anything toorash and stupid, and end up shearing off the connectors, or, you know, cutting or crimping or otherwise bending up the flat flex
cable them no, that would definitely not be agood time. but this is fairly simple - just pull it out, it comes out nicely and quite simply no difficulty at all, so that's fine. so theoretically we take out the torx bits, and we sort of discover immediately that--cannot do. the smallest torx bit that i have isactually larger than the torx bits on
the macbook's hard drive. thosecrews don't do anything important, he said arrogantly, those screws arebasically just really to hold the steady and secure, in the assembly of the macbook. so i can do without it, i can just takethe ssd drive and i can pop it in without the mounting. and obviously that means that i can't go on any roller coasters with my macbook, but nonetheless this should be good enough. we can put the mounting screw in, but as you see, itwobbles a little bit from side to side,
it's not entirely perfect, but to see whether this works as aproof of concept, and that's probably really all this is, i may not necessarily keep this drive inthe machine, i don't know, we'll see what happens. but fairly straightforward,screw the mounting thing back into position, drop the plate backon, turn it over, and, theoretically bob's your uncle. i'm not going to bequite so rash as to put the screws completely all the way back into this unit just yet.
see if it works first. also, as you can see on the old hard drivethere's a little piece of plastic which it makes it easier to lift the drive out of the macbook should you need to. since we're ignoring the mounting screws on the side we don't need one of those either. so, all put it-- we've not put the screws back in as youcan see, but let's give it a try, see if it actually works, press the button,
and see what happens. well it comes up at least with the familiarwhite screen, this is all good, this is a obvious sign of progress, atestament to the complete success of the project. nothing can go wrong now. huh. something not right there. now whatever that flashing folder with aquestion mark in it means, it almost certainly means i messed it up. i've either not-- presumably, whatever i did,whatever i thought i was copying
the disk, either for some reason, perhapsbecause it was in a usb enclosure or perhaps because i probably justdidn't do it right, or i copied the wrong part of the wrong part of thedrive, perhaps the wrong partition, perhaps i didn't image the whole drive, perhaps i only copied a partition toanother. whatever i did, i messed it up. so, change of plan, instead of trying to copy the hard drivethat was in this machine let's try and put a new
blank os on it, as if it was abrand new machine. we can do that by booting up and holdingdown control r, which should get into some kind ofrecovery menu and says starting internet recovery. this is delightful, i've never seen this before because i've never broken my mac to such a degree that it has ever becomenecessary, but this is, you know, this is very nice. it seems to work. i what i found most interesting aboutthis, which will become clear as this video goes on, is that this
seems to download a new stub installer of osx from the internet. but it never once asks me for a wirelesspassword. and it's obviously doing it over wireless because there was no ethernet cable connected to this so it's either got some kind of memoryfrom what was copied over to that ssd, which i doubt, because if it was in the right place for it to be able to find that, it would have been able to start up theos in the first place. or,
you know, perhaps the actual hardware of the macbook itself has some kind of physical storage where that part of-- some kind of physicalstorage where the memory somehow of key information, like, you know, some kindof emergency wifi password to get back onto the network, is stored. i do not know. as we can see this is obviously doing something. fiveminutes that's not a terribly long time. i mean myinternet connection is
pretty quick so it may be that you don'tget this kind of recovery speed all the time but let's see what it's doing. we're not going to sit here for the whole five minutes, i'm going to skip through this jump forward to bringing the main points ofwhat happened here, and to chronicle the complete fail, so thatfuture generations may be spared the nightmare of having toreinstall osx on their macbook. so, what we get here is akind of recovery mode where we can restore from backup and were it not for the fact thatmy time machine backup disk
failed some weeks ago, and that's aseparate story, then i could restore from that. but no, so what we're going to do here, we're just going to completely reimagine, or reinstall, more or less a brand new system. as you can see it's not happy with the existing file system on the ssd drive. i've almost certainlydone something wrong. i've just not copied in the rightfashion. i don't know why it's offering me ms dos, that may
indicate that i've done something wrong, or it may be the default that it offers you when you come to-- when you present it with a drive that it doesn't know how it should be. i assume this needs formatting, so we'll give it a go. macintosh ssd. and we can erase that, now. am i sure? yes, i am. erase. and that shouldn't take long... as indeed it didn't. and you may havenoticed it, but obviously i haven't yet: that 64gb capacity is muchsmaller
than the drive actually should be, sowhatever i've done here i've royally messed something up. the partition must have been wrong, something like that, but what we will find when i go to install a new copy of macos x is that it will -- at some point i willactually notice the problem. i don't know whatit actually offers me lion, possibly just because of theage of the machine, the machine actually wasrunning mavericks. i think it was actually shipped with lion, so that's
probably where that memory comes from. as you can see there, this is the pointwhere i actually noticed hold on a second, 64 gig, what's the dealwith that, so again: this is what happens when youdon't know what you're doing. basically. i have a vague idea, i'm not completely stupid, i have enough of an idea what i'm doing to get myself into trouble i suppose, butnot sort of like, i haven't yet with the mac made themistakes that kind of contribute towards yourexperience
so that-- like people who are very expert in certain things, they knowwhat to look for because they know what's tripped them up in the past. i haven't made those mistakes yet, i don'thave that learning, so i've only got a rough idea of the concepts of what's going on and as i say, what i'm having have to do here is quit out of the lion installer, go back over to the disk utility to findout what the deal with that 64 gig is, because it's
obviously not right, and see if we canactually get the ssd formatted to 512 which as you can see there, it actually says it is. so, whatever happened, i don't know, i'm goingto format it again just in case in the hope that it makes any kind ofdifference whatsoever. so we'll type in macintosh i don't know, macintosh ssd.
512 gig, that's what they want, we'll jus erase it. there it's giving me a warning about erasing a partition, so that's probably what i got wrong. that 64gig was-- whatever i did, i messed it up, clearly. but over there we see is a mac ssd that's a partition so we should be good togo to actually install lion, and hopefully once i've installed lion, i can install mavericks or-- actually i think as it turns out i went for yosemite,purely because that's the
latest one and it seems like-- i kind of lag behind in installing very latest fashions of oses. i've felt kind of burned, imust admit, by ios 7 on the ipads, i was, you know, not really happywith the really substantial visual changes to that, and i'm sure most people don't worry about that kind of thing, but it just annoyed me a littlebit, so i'm a little bit cautious with like a upgrading straight away to the very latest
oses. but as you can see, this is fineit's getting on with installing osx lion i think it's downloading it - it's obviously downloading it. actually it's probably already got that from the thing before, but we'll give it some power as it seemed to be complaining about that, and it's installing. a couple of seconds ago it said 35 minutes, now it says 21. so, whatever's happening, it's pretty happywith the speed. it shouldn't take anything like thatlong, again
i'm not going to make you sit through it, i'm going to skip forward. so, osx is installing and now it's going to take another 23 minutes. so exactly what itwas doing before, i don't know, why it's going to take-- we have two rounds of installation, you know, that's fine, you know, you just leave it there, you wait for it to do its do, and you come back. now what you'll notice here-- listen to those fans! whatever's happening here the machine ismaking exceptionally heavy weather of it, it's --
you wouldn't have thought that an os install would use quite so much power, to the extent that it feels the need to slam the fans on like that. i very rarely actually ever comeacross a situation where the fans on the macbook have even come on, which again probably just speaks to thefact that i don't use it anything like as much as i should do. but, as we'll see, it's installing, the percolations are imminent, it's almostfinished. again this is probably the best part of about an hour
i've telescoped down into a few minutes of video. hooray - complete. we get to restart computer in sevenseconds or less. so, that sounds very positive. restart it, and see what happens now. so we should be coming up into a completely clean install of lion, see how long it actually takes to start up. hopefully not too long, because this isnow all booting off an ssd, there's on hard involved here, but obviously the firstboot of any os is going to take a
little bit longer while it works out where things are. but that didn't take too long. and we have to go through the process of setting up bits and pieces. we have to be told how to operate our trackpads before we are allowed to progress in to the main show of the os install, but until we have demonstrated that we knowhow to do this we are not allowed to do anything else. so... and there it is, it looks like
os 10. off we go to the application store to pull down the latest version-- let's go for yosemite, we may as well try the very latest, we're kinda bleeding-edge here with an ssd in the thing in the first place, so while that's downloading we can catch up with linus tech tips on the ipad. i'm sure this won't take long. actually it's going to take a very long time, so let's skip ahead to when it's all installed, save you the time. hey look it's installed! wasn't that good. so, we have an ssd install, it's nice, it's nippy, we can get our updates
and open up our safari and all that kind of jazz. it's-- you know, this is very is verysuperficial, but basically the performance of the machinenow it's got an ssdin it, feels a lot nippier. it obviously doesn't make the machine any less heavy, which is part of the reason why i don'tcarry it around with me to the extent that i do the macbook air, which is a much lighter machine. i think that the actual light-weightness, if that is a word, is something that i appreciate far more than power, but as you can see, we're getting--
it works, there doesn't seem to beanything not to like about yosemite so far at least, it seems to have installed all the software that i'm after, so give it a test to seeactually how fast it actually boots. this is, you know, a very good key comparison because we looked at this before, we saw how long it took, so with an ssd, is it any faster? and i suppose the answer is... well, yes itis. that is just over a third of the time that it takes normally toboot up
from a hard drive, so i can't really complain about that. speed is good, nothing not to like about that, and we can open and shutdown the machine reallyquite quickly. but, the key question, how quick is it? so, a copy of blackmagic speed test here, give this a spin. and... yow! that is-- pretty good from my perspective. just short of 500 meg a second read,
and in the respectable 400's in terms of write. that makes every other mac i own look like a pieceof cheese. even with the thunderbolt connecteddrobo, that gets nowhere near that kind of speed. that tops out at 160, 200 meg for reading and writing. so just forcomparison let's try the-- this is the macbook air now-- let's try the disk speed test on that.
just to see, in comparison. this is astock apple ssd, its already in the machine, obviously. and as you can see the performance is still good, still up tossd levels, but it's nowhere near as blazingly fast as that crucial ssd, so that's quite impressive. if it weren't for thefact the macbook pro is so heavy i would probably be tempted to usethat as my daily driver. but as you see actually, the read performance is very very impressive compared to thewrite actually, there's a substantial
difference between the write and the readspeed on the macbook air which i've not seen on the crucial ssd. 612 meg a second read, and even, say, even 152 meg write is no slouch, it'll do. so i'm not reallysure what we've learned from any of this but, erm, if you have any comments, pleaseleave them, and thank you for watching.
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