TR Forums

Well, Apple has sent out a press release where they will be introducing OSX Lion:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/31/appl ... ay-june-6/

I currently have a 2009 13" MBP, and I am planning to upgrade whenever Lion is released (their website says summer, but that could mean August/September or even later if there are delays)

With the upgrade, I want to move to an SSD since Lion reportedly supports TRIM. I'm hoping the jump in hard drive performance can hold me over from a complete upgrade for another year or two. I was thinking of going with a 120 or 128GB drive, since the prices of current/last generation drives are starting to drop below $2/GB. I'm moving up from a 320GB 7200RPM drive, so even if I am getting last year's technology, it is still a big step up.

What do you guys think? I will have external storage, but another option is to take out the optical drive which I never use and put in a SSD conversion kit:

http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

You can enable TRIM in snow leopard too. Google for it, theres a patch. I am running Lion Dev Release 3. I have a late 2010 MBP 15" Core i5. I did exactly what you propose. I put a 128gb Corsair RealSSD C300 in the HD bay and replace the Optical drive with a 500gb Seagate Momentus XT. Really can't complain about the performance at all.

Corrado wrote:

You can enable TRIM in snow leopard too. Google for it, theres a patch. I am running Lion Dev Release 3. I have a late 2010 MBP 15" Core i5. I did exactly what you propose. I put a 128gb Corsair RealSSD C300 in the HD bay and replace the Optical drive with a 500gb Seagate Momentus XT. Really can't complain about the performance at all.

Odd question: Did you find that the laptop is still balanced after the change?

Yeah, the adapter bay is plastic, and the HD isn't exactly heavy. That said, the optical drive is incredibly light. I noticed no difference in balance or weight. I also noticed no difference in battery life.

Corrado wrote:

Yeah, the adapter bay is plastic, and the HD isn't exactly heavy. That said, the optical drive is incredibly light. I noticed no difference in balance or weight. I also noticed no difference in battery life.

Great
Always wanted to know that. I see an optibay in my future.

I went to see Lion at lunch today. I think I am probably going to give this one a miss, for a while anyway.

I'm usually pretty excited to get the latest OS, but frankly, I don't care for a lot of the new UI "improvements". I think this goes beyond "it's new and different, therefore scary". I think they genuinely may have messed this up.

Thresher wrote:

I went to see Lion at lunch today. I think I am probably going to give this one a miss, for a while anyway.

I'm usually pretty excited to get the latest OS, but frankly, I don't care for a lot of the new UI "improvements". I think this goes beyond "it's new and different, therefore scary". I think they genuinely may have messed this up.

Most of the 'improvements' don't need to be used if you don't want to. And its $30 for 5 licenses (assuming they're all in your household)... how can you really go wrong?

I'm testing Lion here at work. So far so good as far as app compatibility is concerned (Office 2011, CS5 and Remote Desktop are the major ones for me).

I've got it running on my HTPC (Mac mini) at home. There were connectivity issues with remote apps (iTeleport/HippoRemote/LogMeIn) but app updates have sorted that out.

I'm very happy with Lion.

Corrado wrote:

Thresher wrote:

I went to see Lion at lunch today. I think I am probably going to give this one a miss, for a while anyway.

I'm usually pretty excited to get the latest OS, but frankly, I don't care for a lot of the new UI "improvements". I think this goes beyond "it's new and different, therefore scary". I think they genuinely may have messed this up.

Most of the 'improvements' don't need to be used if you don't want to. And its $30 for 5 licenses (assuming they're all in your household)... how can you really go wrong?

Good point. Just don't see any overwhelming reason to upgrade and quite a few reasons not to.

The licensing is quite a bit more permissive than I would have expected. $30 for *all* the X86-64 Apple-branded computers you "control", and 2 additional licenses per machine for virtualization. That's borderline dizzying. Even Snow Leopard's $50 "family pack" was cheap, but this just blows the doors off of that, potentially.

I mean, hell, I effectively "control" my parents' PC. If they were on a Mac, I'd at least feel no remorse upgrading that machine.

The biggest reason my mother has for not upgrading is that Rosetta will no longer be supported on Lion. She has a significant investment in OS X PowerPC applications ($600 or so?) that she's happy with and doesn't want to pay to upgrade. She'll actively hold back getting Lion and considering a migration to Windows 7 when Lion becomes forced upon the user base (as it will be eventually), the idea being to buy the applications one last time and rely on Windows' history of providing superior backwards compatibility (which is, as we all know, a blessing and a curse).

Righto. In the case of PPC apps, you're stuck with at least SL on a bootable partition somewhere. Seems a TINY bit premature, but then again, PPC Macs were discontinued 5 years ago, and for the most part, PPC-only software is found mostly as old versions that have been obsoleted. Still, if your mom is happy (and the existence of sites like Low End Mac tell me that she's not alone) then no reason to upgrade, and all kinds of reasons not to, at least for now.

Successfully upgraded to Lion, but on my current 300GB 7200 RPM drive. Still playing with the idea of getting an SSD or sticking it out until I buy a completely new system in a few years.

Known Issues with Adobe products on Mac OS 10.7 Lion:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/905/cpsid_90508.html

Currently Pro Tools 9 is not certified (and further, Avid says it will not work) with Lion. That's not any different than the Snow Leopard launch, and seems to be Digidesign/Avid's MO. They hook it so deep and build such strong dependencies that they don't even recommend point release updates (i.e. 10.6. until long after their release.

http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=304602

1st pain in the ass found. I just did a full wipe and reinstall of a clean Lion from a DVD i burned (the others were upgrades from 10.6). The fact that drag lock is GONE by default and you must use the horrid Three Finger Drag is an abomination. Luckily they put all the 'deprecated' options in the Universal Access menu in the System Preferences menus. Been using my touchpad and multi-touch gestures for YEARS... you can't just change them and hide the option to change it back. Luckily I got it back working as expected.

In terms of an SSD, I'm thinking of going with the Intel 320 120GB SSD and adding in the opti-bay so I'll have the extra storage. Any reasons why I should switch to a different SSD?

themattman wrote:

In terms of an SSD, I'm thinking of going with the Intel 320 120GB SSD and adding in the opti-bay so I'll have the extra storage. Any reasons why I should switch to a different SSD?

There has been a lot of issues regarding Intel 320's. I would avoid them like the plague.

Link

Personally I love my 120GB 320 series. The "avoid them like the plague" thing is super-duper overrated. It's not OCZ here. The problem has to do with unexpectedly power cycling them repeatedly.

edit: the only thing that's super important here is to realize that TRIM is only supported on drives with Apple firmware within Lion.

derFunkenstein wrote:

Personally I love my 120GB 320 series. The "avoid them like the plague" thing is super-duper overrated. It's not OCZ here. The problem has to do with unexpectedly power cycling them repeatedly.

edit: the only thing that's super important here is to realize that TRIM is only supported on drives with Apple firmware within Lion.

It seems like the bug happens in only specific cases, which is better than it just randomly burning out. And you get a 5 year warranty which could be helpful down the road.

It looks like if I delete some unused files and programs (and use a storage drive), I can get my disk usage down to about 70GB, which would give me about 40GB of quick storage to play around with.

I feel like it is very confusing to understand TRIM and the MacBook Pro.

From what I gather if you buy an SSD from Apple TRIM IS supported in Lion. But if it is not from Apple, it is not? I've seen guides that show you how to turn it on, so I was hoping that they work. But then I've also heard that certain SSD's use TRIM via the firmware and others use the OS's version of TRIM. I'm confused.

I've had great luck with Crucial SSDs on MacBook Pro's.

You can enable TRIM support in Snow Leopard or Lion via an unapproved utility. Without that, TRIM support is only enabled if you get the SSD shipped in the machine by Apple. I installed my own, ran the utility, and am currently running just fine with TRIM enabled.

Firmware isn't really TRIM -- it's simply algorithms to try to figure out which pages can be reclaimed. Only the OS can tell the drive which pages it considers free, which is real TRIM support.

On another note, I decided to make the upgrade to 8GB of RAM since it is so darn cheap right now ($52.99). I'm planning to use Photoshop and InDesign more this fall/spring, so I wanted to give myself some more room to work with. And with the SSD upgrade I'll finish all the updates I plan to make with my Mid 2009 MBP. My goal is to see how long I can keep this machine, possibly until a mobile version of Haswell comes out some time in 2013.