In the past I had built three PC's from scratch. I loved it every time. The whole process of designing the PC, comparing processors, graphics cards, motherboards, reading Tom's hardware, Muro plaza, and numerous other sites, has been the most enjoyable part of getting the new computer. After all the troubleshooting and tweaks to get the PC up and running, the enthusiasm fades for the new computer, and I find the passion somewhere else (photography, building power amplifier for the home HI-FI system, mountain bike, building a precision motorized router table, designing cyclone dust collection system, 3D modeling the bathrooms and kitchen, measuring living room loudspeakers SPL and frequency response, finding the best portable pressure washer man has built, to name a few).
Would going to MBP mean that I would loose the primary source of enjoyment (=process of building it) of getting an new computer? Not necessarily, thanks to human capacity for self-delusion. I wasn't hard to reason that the out-of-the-box MBP has inadequate performance. Wants to disassemble it, change parts, and reassemble it had nothing to do with the reasoning. I knew that I wasn't satisfied with the performance even before I had gotten the MBP on my hands. In fact, my MBP is still somewhere between my home and the place they dispatch the Macs.
Options for architecture choices and components are numerous when you are building a computer from scratch. With a laptop like MBP, the options are quite limited. Hence, I had to focus only to things that are feasible for my skills, i.e.
- Adding RAM (which is so trivial that it isn't classified as a tweak)
- Installing a solid state drive (SSD) to speed up the boot, programs, and about everything which involves the mass storage of the computer; conventionally that is hard disk drive (HDD)
Replacing the HDD with SSD was not really an option because no reasonably priced SSD won't hold the pictures and video files that keep on demanding more and more storage capacity.
- Canon 7D raw format pictures are ~25MB each
- GoPro2 HD video files (1080p@25fps or 720p@50fps) are ~120GB/min
The HDD that comes with the MBP is 750GB, and it will be adequate for the picture and video files for at least one more year. 2T HDD (or even even better, 2T SSD) would be nice, but it is not really feasible in laptops today. Third demand for the capacity comes from more than 500 albums of music I have (in FLAC format, ~200GB), but I will store them at an existing 500GB storage NAS box.
As the SSD alone is not sufficient in terms of capacity, I need to find a way of maintaining the HDD in the system. To optimize the best qualities of both (fast read/write of SSD and capacity of HDD), a solution is to dedicate the SSD for the operating system and programs, and HDD for capacity hungry picture and video files. This way the MBP boots and opens the programs faster and has good storage capacity. There are numerous YouTube HDD vs. SSD booting videos like the following one.
Straightforward solution would be to replace the optical drive with a caddy for the SSD. Unfortunately, 6Gb/s Sata 3 drives do not work reliably in the optical bay even on the latest MBP 15" and 17" models. There is a good OWC blog about it. A solution for that is to move the HDD from the main bay to the optical bay, and, install the Sata 3 SSD to the main bay which supports the Sata 3 drives just fine. The HDD in a non Sata 3 supported optical bay should not be a problem since.
Having two disks in the MBP means that the optical drive goes external. This is not a problem, since eBay is full of very affordable external cases for the MacBook Pro Optibay drives. eBay is also the right place to find a caddy to fit SSD/HDD to the place of the internal optical bay.
The opportunity for further (=future) improvement would be (=will be) sufficiently large SSD which could hold my photo files in it. Today one GB ~1Eur. When this becomes 10GB ~1Eur, it will be no brainer. I am using Lightroom for photo editing. Lightroom reads every time the raw files even when I am viewing the already edited photos. This is because Lightroom has to read the big raw file to render it for the edited result. There is a nice article of SSD and Lightroom performance
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