GeekwithEnvy

SSD

How to Upgrade Your Mac

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Apple’s latest line up of computers are extremely thin and compact, it’s amazing how much can fit in such a small form factor. All of this makes for an amazing design but it also has a downside.

To those of us who are more inclined to tinker with our machines, it can appear as if there’s almost no way to upgrade Apple’s latest and greatest. There is good news however. If you want to add some RAM or your own SSD to your Mac, then there’s probably a way to do it. You can even get step-by-step instructional videos on how to do it along with all the tools you will need.

All of this can be found at OWC (Other World Computing). OWC offers all kinds of options for upgrading your Mac, they sell the hardware and tools you will need to get the job done and all of it is reasonably priced so you can save some cash by doing it all yourself.

The upgrade projects can vary in skill level quite a bit, some of them are quite simple while others will require you to be pretty confident about tearing down your Mac. It’s safe to say that most of these upgrades are for the bold but if you’re not up to doing it yourself then in some cases OWC can do it for you.

All of their installation videos are available on their site but you can also view them on their YouTube channel. OWC also offers repair services for your iPad along with a ton of accessories and additional software.

 

 

How To Optimize your SSD

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Moving from your old hard disk drive to a new solid state drive is a great way to upgrade your system. SSD’s (solid state drives) are extremely fast, quiet and efficient. However, there are a few differences between these two types of storage and SSDs require a bit of system tweaking to ensure your getting the most out of your new drive.

Drive Indexing

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Indexing is used to speed up file queries and dosen’t really need to be used with a SSD considering their read performance is already fast.

Indexing can be disabled by clicking Start Menu>Right-Click Computer>Manage>Services and Applications>Services>Right-Click Windows Search>Properties. Locate Start Up Type>Select Disabled and then click OK.

Defragmentation

SSDs are fundamentally different when it comes to how they store data. SSDs do not need to be defragmented. Defragmenting a SSD will only shorten the lifespan of the drive by performing unnecessary read/write operations.

Windows will automatically defragment your drives unless you head into your settings and change the defaults. Here is how you can turn off defragment scheduling.

Click Start Menu> All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter. Then, click on the Configure Schedule button. Then simply uncheck the Run on a schedule check box and click OK.

You can also completely disable defragmenting through the Computer Management settings.

Start Menu> Right Click Computer>Manage>Services and Applications>Services. Locate “Disk Defragmenter” and right click on it, then change the “Start up type” to Disabled.

Page file

This option involves disabling the pagefile. Your pagefile is used as virtual memory and if you lack a decent amount of system RAM, you should consider asking Windows to use another drive besides your SSD to use for your pagefile rather then completely disabling it, as this could lead to performance issues.

Disabling your pagefile can be beneficial to your SSD as it reduces the amount of writes to the drive.

To disable your pagefile click Start Menu>Right-Click Computer>Properties>Advanced System Settings>Advanced Tab>Settings under “Performance”>Advanced Tab>Click Change under “Virtual Memory”> Uncheck “Automatically Manage Paging File Size for all Drives” then click “No Paging File> then click SET and OK. You should reboot your computer after this is done.

If you were considering just changing the drive that handles the pagefile instead follow the directions above up until you reach the, “Automatically Manage Paging File Size for all Drives” option and simply uncheck and choose a drive to manage your pagefile.

Temporary File Storage

Consider changing where your temporary files are being stored. Click>Start Menu>Right-Click Computer>and select Properties. Click Advanced System Settings and move to the advanced tab, then click Environment Variables. Change the folder and drive that your temporary files are saved to. This will reduce read/write operations to your SSD.

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As for Mac users, the latest version of OS X supports the TRIM command which will handle what’s called “Garbage Collection”,  which it does independent of the firmware on the drive itself. TRIM will essentially increase OS performance by making sectors available when needed.

As you can see the main objective here is to do as few read/write operations as possible in order to extend the life of your SSD. As technology advances, we should see a better life expectancy for these drives and new support from operating systems that will optimize for SSD usage.

 

 

 

 

 

Solid State Drives: Why You Need One

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As we go over the long list of specs on a new computer we usually gloss over our storage options and focus more on processing power and memory, and for good reason as our storage options haven’t really changed much over the years.

Now, a new option has arrived on scene, Solid State Drives (SSDs). Solid State Drives are a whole new beast and they have a lot to offer. SSDs are comprised of multiple flash memory chips that are all connected together.

Being comprised only of chips means that Solid State Drives contain no moving parts and unlike the Hard Drives we are used to using, are completely silent when in operation. We can finally say goodbye to that grinding sound we hear everytime our drives spin up, but to their credit they have become much quieter over the years.

What makes this technology so amazing is its speed. SSDs read and write data at such blazing speeds that on some systems, can make Windows load faster than the animation that plays during boot up. Load times in games are reduced drastically and content loads much faster though out the whole system. It really shows how much of a bottleneck our old Hard Drives were.

However, it took me a while to build up the courage to buy one and put all my data on one these new drives. When SSDs first started to pop up in stores there were many problems with the firmware installed on these drives, some of which could result in a complete failure of the drive itself. Another issue was price, it was hard to justify the cost per GB. SSDs that have been on the market for a while now and a lot of manufacturers seem to have worked out alot of the bugs that plagued early SSDs. SSDs are becoming much more popular, in fact SSDs are now being installed in the new Macbook Pro (retina), and performance gains are obvious

Prices are still not nearly as cheap as the old hard drives but there are many deals going on right now as companies and retailers are trying to push the world towards this new storage option. Still think its a bit to pricey ? No need to worry, as consumers buy more of these drives I expect to see prices drop again.

I did remain skeptical for a long time about how much performance gain I would really see until I just jumped in and bought one of these drives. If your curious as to how my experience was, let me just say that once you buy one of these you will probably never go back.