SSD as main working drive?

[Omar Abushaikha]

Hey Andrew,

 

  I saw your post about working with premiere/ae with the bmcc and noticed you said you are using a macbook with an SSD as the main drive.

 

  I just got my BMCC and havent been able to really use it at all because my macbook keeps crapping on itself everytime I try to do anything with the dng files or resolve. I have the same exact laptop as you I believe: Apple 2011 Macbook Pro 17' i7 8GB RAM.

 

I've been trying to do as much research as I can about installing an SSD as the main drive and switching the optical drive out of my computer in order to place my current 750gb HDD where I can save files to and actually have space to put stuff in. (I have plenty of external hard drives too, but it's nice to have space on your computer as well) The SSD I am very close to purchasing is the Samsung 840 Pro Series 256gb, which is supposed to be VERY, VERY fast.

 

  The only thing stoppnig me from going through with it is the "cloning" process. I know I will have to put my OS (lion) on the ssd, but I am very confused about what I should do with all my applications (adobe cs6, divinci resolve, lightroom, film convert, etc, etc), and all the plugins I use like magic bullet, video copilot stuff, twixtor etc, along with everything else that is on my HDD right now. The reason I'm confused is because some people have told me that even though all that stuff will be saved on the HDD, I will have to go back and reinstall all the applications I use, onto the SSD. In short, I am just COMPLETELY lost about what I actually need to put on the SSD and how.

 

  I have asked many different BMD and apple reps and have called nearby computer service stores and have gotten different answers from each of them. So I hope I can finally get an answer I trust from you since you have actually done the upgrade to the same computer I have, and have had great results with it, especially with your BMCC.

 

Thanks so much,

 

Omar A.

[peederj]

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy over the relevant parts of your rotational drive to the SSD (not all the movie/document bulk storage data). That way you shouldn't have to rebuild from scratch.

 

http://www.bombich.com

[Omar Abushaikha]

Yeah, I have CCC, I just dont know what exactly needs to be cloned over so that my computer works the same as it does now but much faster.

 

I've heard that if you just clone the applications over to the SSD, it can cause more problems, however a fresh install of each application will ensure that the applications know what is currently running in your computer (for example, the app will notice that there is no optical drive anymore and that the spinning HDD is not the main drive anymore and thus it will gain its speed from the new SSD) One of the serivce people I've talked to said that just cloning over the applications from the HDD to the SSD will have no effect since the application will still have the data stored and think it's running off the old and much slower hard drive.

 

BUT, I am not a tech guy at all! I no little about computer internals, I am a camera guy all the way haha. I just want to ensure that with the money I have spent on the bmcc and the amount I will have to spend on the SSD, that I will get the BEST preformance out of my Macbook Pro and will happily be able to edit 2.5K projects and use Davinci Resolve.

[peederj]

If hard drive access time is the rate limiter on your application speed, cloning onto a faster drive will speed up your applications. Applications don't "think they're on a slower drive." They request information from the drive and operate on it as soon as it gets to them.

 

Just clone your drive onto the SSD, if it all doesn't fit then uncheck the folders you don't need copied over (data/docs/etc.). See how it goes. I have done it successfully several times.

[EeeCeeGee]

Tell the tech guy he's talking bollocks. My mid 2010 MBP is way faster with a SSD (Samsung 840) and yes I cloned it with CCC.

[Omar Abushaikha]

Tell the tech guy he's talking bollocks. My mid 2010 MBP is way faster with a SSD (Samsung 840) and yes I cloned it with CCC.

Awesome! That makes me feel much better! Thanks Guys!

[EeeCeeGee]

Awesome! That makes me feel much better! Thanks Guys!

Some more info can be read here

 

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1505922

 

And

 

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1515753

 

for using trim enabler