The MacBook Air is the product of two obviously compelling trends: SSDs are replacing hard drives and DVD drives aren’t nearly as necessary as they once were. As much as I like the new Air, however, it isn’t the right laptop for me right now. I need more disk space, processor horsepower, and better options than USB to get to external storage. I did decide, however, that it was time to take advantage of these the trends that make the Air possible and update my existing laptop accordingly.
For this upgrade, I bought a 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD and a OWC Data Doubler bracket. Why the bracket? It allows me to keep my original hard drive in place and install the SSD in place of my existing DVD drive.
Now, I’ve got a super fast boot drive and a decent size internal data disk that I can use to store images and other media while on the road before needing to break out an external disk for anything other than periodic backups. That’s going to be quite nice.
How fast is my laptop now? Oh wow. It’s quite the upgrade. The combination of high transfer rate with true random access is a joy. My experience matches that you have probably heard over and over. Super fast boots. Near instant application launches. Yeah, it’s that good. It’s the kind of experience that leaves you asking why you didn’t do it much earlier. It’s definitely going to add a lot of time to the usable lifetime of this machine for me.
How’s life without a DVD drive in my laptop? Just fine, thank you very much. I’ve long kept my Mac OS X install disk on a USB drive and can easily borrow my Mac Pro’s DVD drive when needed. There’s even a way enable MacBook Air-style remote drive sharing if you want.
What’s the weight penalty of having two drives installed? Not even noticeable. The bracket and SSD weigh 20 grams more than the DVD drive I took out. I can live with that.
What about power consumption and the impact of having two drives on battery life? That’s a good question. I don’t have a handle on that yet. I’m hoping that the data drive will stay spun down unless I’m actively using it and not pull a lot of power. But, there is a slight method to my madness. My MacBook Pro is one of the early unibodies where the hard drive is in the battery compartment. That gives me easy access to remove or change the spinning hard drive anytime. If it seems that there’s an obnoxious negative impact, I can easily give it a test.
Update/Tech Note: Patrick Linskey ran into an issue with sleeping his laptop when running his boot drive in the DVD bay and had to swap the drives around. He posted a test to tickle the problem. FWIW, my laptop doesn’t exhibit the issue. Still, worth a check.