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Weekend Project: New Mac for ~$200 — Upgrade from HDD to SSD

October 21, 2012 in apple, tech by George | 1 comment

My late 2008 MacBook Pro had become virtually unusable. Opening almost any application resulted in the spinning beach ball of doom. I was constantly having to force quit applications, shut down the machine, and restart (which took forever) to accomplish the simplest of tasks.

Now, I don’t blame Apple. I’ve gotten a good three or so years out of this machine, and that’s about the best you’re going to get.

So, you have two choices.

You either:
(A) Shell out for a new machine (and, anyone who knows me knows how susceptible I am to new Apple products, and the current Airs, MBP with Retina, and the soon-to-be-announced 13″ MBP with Retina, look darn good)

(B) Replace the Hard Drive with a Solid State Drive

Any of us who have iPhones or iPads have become accustomed to apps opening instantly, and generally being super-responsive. This is because rather than using old-school hard drives (HDD) that spin, they instead use solid state drives (SSD) that have no moving parts, and, therefore, perform much faster.

These solid state drives, due to Moore’s Law, have – over the past few years – become increasingly inexpensive, and able to store large amounts of stuff. Therefore, a 256G SSD drive, while once obscenely expensive in comparison to the same size HDD, is now affordable (remember, iPhones and iPads have relatively small storage space (the new iPhone5 tops out at 64G).

Most of the new macs are shipped with SSDs, but for most people (i.e. those who didn’t order a custom Mac or an Air) who bought their Macs prior to 2011, they still – like I do – have HDDs. The performance of these HDDs degrades over time to a point where the machine becomes unusable. At this point, most people buy a new machine (perhaps it’s planned obsolescence on Apple’s part – perhaps not).

Buying a new machine is, of course, a fine (if expensive option). However, aside from the Retina displays (which are great), if you’ve bought a Mac in the last three years or so there haven’t been too many changes to either form or function.

Taken together, option B, above, becomes a no-brainer.

Except…

It means opening up your machine and fooling with the guts. For most people this is a non-starter, and so they buy a new machine.

Having, just this morning (in under 30 minutes), swapped out my HDD for a SSD, and now, feeling like I’m running the fastest computer on earth, I really must encourage you to try replacing your HDD with a SSD before you shell out for a new machine.

Here’s how:

1. Order what you need:
a. SSD drive: Samsung 830 256GB SATA Internal Solid State Drive (you could go with more storage space, but the price goes from $189 for 256GB to $508 for 512GB; if you’ve got more than 256GB of stuff on your machine, I’d suggest moving some of it (photos, movies) to an external drive).

b. Cable to connect your new drive to the USB on your computer so you can clone your HDD to your new SSD (more on this below). This cable does the trick. The accompanying disc that makes this a “Harddrive Upgrade Kit” is worthless; you won’t use it.

c. A tiny screwdriver. This one has all the bits you need, and is nicely magnetic.

d. Hard Disk Caddy (OPTIONAL, but recommended). This is so that you can move your HDD to the space that is currently occupied by your optical (ie DVD drive). This will give you more space to store files, BUT you will no longer be able to put DVDs or CDs into your computer. Also, if your HDD is really shot this makes no sense. If, on the other hand, your HDD is working, but sluggish, it’s a great way to double your storage space (move all your photos, movies, etc. to this HDD, but leave your apps, etc., on your new SSD).

2. Download Carbon Copy Cloner. This piece of software (free 30 day trial) will make an EXACT copy of your machine on your new SSD. This means that it’s bootable; i.e. you can start your machine up from the copy of your machine. This is VERY different than, for instance, a Time Machine back up, which backs up your files, but does not do so in a way that you can boot from (you have to put them back in the right place, deal with permissions, etc. Nightmare).

3. Format your new SSD. Plug the cable you got from the list above into your new SSD and run Disk Utility on your Mac. Erase the SSD, and rename it (I called mine, “George’s SSD”). This reformats it in a manner that allows your Mac to talk to it.

4. Make a clone of your HDD onto your SSD. With the SSD still plugged into your cable, run Carbon Copy Cloner. It’ll ask you if you want it to create a recovery partition. You do. After this is done, clone your disk. Depending on how much stuff you have on your HDD, this could take a while. It took about five hours for me to clone around 120GB.

5. Check to make sure the Cloning worked. With the new SSD still plugged in via your cable, shut down your mac, and then restart while holding the Option key down. Once the machine starts up you should see options for which disk you want to boot from. Boot from the SSD. Don’t be disheartened if it takes a few minutes (remember, you’re transferring information over USB – not fast). Open some apps, and docs, and make sure everything is working OK. Assuming it is, shut down your Mac.

Now comes the fun/scary part.

6. Replace your HDD with your SSD. Unplug your Mac, turn it on its back, and pull up the little lever that opens the battery/HD cover. Using your little screwdriver unscrew the screws around your HDD, and then pull the little piece of tape that pops it out. Pop in the new SSD, making sure to connect the male to the female parts of the interface, and screw it back in.

If you’re not replacing your optical (i.e. CD/DVD drive) with your old HDD, you’re done. Just pop the battery cover on, and reboot your machine (normally, i.e. without holding down “option”), and enjoy your new mac. You should also make sure Trim is enabled on your new drive. Download THIS app (free), and run it.

If you are, continue…

7. Take the entire back of the mac off. Unscrew all of the other screws around the cover so that the entire back of your machine comes off. Make sure you remember which screw goes in which hole.

8. Remove the Optical drive. Unscrew JUST the screws around the optical drive (being careful not to unscrew the onces connected to the fans). Pop it out, and decouple the male from female connector.

9. Put the HDD into the Disk Caddy. Only tricky part here is changing out the Phillips screw driver bit for an Allen-style bit, and unscrewing the sides of the HDD so that it will fit into the caddy.

10. Put the HDD caddy into the Optical Space. It takes a little jiggling, and if the connector unhooks, you MUST press it back together (you’ll see what I mean). There’s really only one way it can go in, so you just have to massage it into place.

Screw everything back together, plug your machine in, and reboot normally.

Now, your machine should scream with speed (remember to enable Trim), and you have extra space via your HDD, which is sitting in your Optical drive’s old space. You can completely wipe this HDD (using disk utility), and then put whatever you want on it. Again, DON’T put your apps or system files on this HDD. You want those on your SSD, as they are giving you all the speed. Instead, put your docs, photos, music, etc. there.

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what I love about now: from idea to action…fast

March 5, 2011 in design, entrepreneurship, innovation, marketing by George | 5 comments

I wrote a post a bit ago called “Buy One, Give One Free” that got batted around the Internet a bit.

The basic gist of my post was that artists (musicians, writers, poets, et al.) could adopt some ideas from Social Entrepreneurship , and repurpose these ideas to their benefit; specifically, the idea (most visible via Toms Shoes) of making it possible to give a product away when a customer buys one.

I bemoaned the fact that I didn’t see an implementation of this type of thing in the arts:

I’ve been frustrated by the lack of a mechanism for this type of sharing of information, which makes it easy for the existent constituent to introduce the work to her friends. As above, one may exist, and, if so, I’d love to see some examples, so please leave them in the comments.

Well, I’m really happy to report that, due to the fact that I have some brilliant friends, we’re making some progress.

I saw the following tweet from Ty White the other day, and new I was in for something good:

As Ty says in his blog post

A few months ago, George Howard blogged about a great idea for artists trying to get their word out: offer your fans the option to send a free copy of the record to a friend when they buy a copy for themselves. It’s a great way to offer your fans additional social capital (by sending a copy of a great record to a friend) while helping the artist get introduced to new people.

I took this idea to Jim from All Smiles, who immediately agreed to try it out with the new record. Easier said than done. As it turned out, we needed a new API call from Topspin (BIG thanks to Varley and Kris!) to detect when the purchase was complete, and also needed a way to store the sharers name, recipient’s name, and recipient’s email. I dove into PHP and MySQL for the first time, and thankfully Topspin bent over backwards to help get the API calls working.

As you can see, it takes a unique type of person (like Ty unquestionably is) to not only see value in an idea (and give credit where credit is due), but implement the idea. As Ty wrote, this was “easier said than done.”

Nevertheless, he did it, and the results have been solid:

Two weeks ago we launched pre-order, and this Tuesday the album hit the street. As of writing, we’ve seen 21% of purchasers take the option to send the album to a friend.

Ty feels this number (21%) can be higher with some tweaking, and offers some good suggestions on how to improve.

My point in all this is that we live today in an era where we can rapidly go from idea to execution. This delights me to no end. Not long ago, in order to get any type of web-based idea up and running was a long, expensive, tedious process that more often than not took the wind out of the excitement of the idea. In other words, you knew that it was going to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to try something out, so you didn’t try. Not good.

Today, we can try with much lower costs (real and opportunity).

I’m fully aware that it takes a uniquely talented type of person, like Ty, to be able to pull something like the “Buy One, Give One Free” idea, but it can be done, and, increasingly, it can be done quickly and cheaply.

This bodes very well for all of us. The more ideas that can get to market – in order to succeed or fail – faster, the better.

Thanks, Ty, for making my little idea manifest. Let’s now continuously improve.

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Replace you’re “About” page with a “How We’re Different” page

September 30, 2010 in strategy, tech by George | No comments

Rather than an “about” page on your site/blog, may I suggest you replace it with a “how we’re different” page.

On the very rare occasions when I see “how we’re different” along the bottom or top of a site – instead of the more typical “about” – I almost always click on it, and I’m almost always glad I did.

It seems that companies who can quickly sum up their competitive advantage (i.e. what makes them different), and do so in human speak are pretty excited to highlight this.

Oh, by the way, if you can’t sum up how you’re different, don’t bother with a web site…or a business.

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A Challenge: One Player to Rule them All

September 12, 2010 in design, marketing, tech by George | 1 comment

I believe we’re increasingly heading to an era where filtering of the unlimited sources of stuff that is thrown at us is the holy grail in terms of apps, etc.

For music, iTunes is a perfectly fine player so long as you’re playing music found on your hard drive. Certainly, it appears that Apple will move to a streaming service at some point. However, as much as I love Apple, I doubt seriously that it’ll be a solution for anything beyond the streaming of songs purchased from the iTunes store (and, candidly, why should it be?).

However, most of us now get our music from a variety of sources. As above, we play what’s on our hard drives via iTunes, and many of us also stream from some service (rdio, spotify, emusic, pandora… whatever)

Some of the above are sort of applauded for their “iTunes-like interface.” The problem is that even if these interfaces are exactly like iTunes, we’re still dealing with interfaces, plural.

We need an interface, singular.

There are some sort of half attempts at this (some only in the Windows, UNIX world): Fubar, Amorak, Songbird, etc. Even Boxee sort of tries to address this (though more for video).

None of these interfaces/clients really give a user what she should have: an interface that pulls in your streams/queues/songs-added-to-collections and songs on your hard drive all in one place.

I should, for instance, be able to play a song I have on my hard drive from the same interface I stream a song I’ve added to my rdio collection.

This isn’t a rights issue, by the way. I pay the $10 a month to stream whatever I want from rdio; I’d be happy if I could stream Pandora from this interface even if it meant having to see ads/hit a paywall if I go over the limit. However, when I do this now, not only do I have to switch interfaces, but I also have to quit iTunes (to make sure I’m not connected to an Airport Express speaker – soon to be AirPlay), then connect Airfoil to the new interface, and re-connect to the remote speaker. Drag.

I believe the net result of this would be far more music consumed, and, thus, far more revenue generated for rights holders, services, etc.

This is at the essence of VRM: Customers must be able to manage relationships with their vendors/suppliers on their terms.

Anything short of this leads frictions that are not beneficial to anyone.

So…someone hack one of these things together for me, please.

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Real time Google Analytics Data

April 1, 2010 in tech by George | No comments

I admit it; I have a problem. First thing in the morning, I check Google Analytics for various sites to get my little mini, daily report card. In this manner, I’d see the stats (visitors, unique visitors, time on site, bounce rate, referrers, etc.) from the prior day.

Well, this is fine and good, but what if you want to know what’s going on in real time?

There are a couple of solutions:

iPhone Solution
Should you have an iPhone (and, one would hope this will work on the iPad shortly as well), you can, for $6.99, get the fantastic AnalyticsPro app.

This app has quickly (sadly) become one of my most used apps on my iPhone.

Google Analytics
If you don’t have an iPhone/don’t want to spend $7 on an app, there is a way to get real time data from the source itself.

It took me some tinkering (and maybe everyone already knows how to do this), but here’s how you can see the stats in real time:

1. Log in to GA and pull up the site you want to review.
2. On the dashboard, click on the little triangle next to the date range (see below):

3. From the expanded date range (i.e. the calendar) click on the current date (see below; this screen grab was done on April 1, and thus that’s what I clicked):

4. Hit apply in the lower right hand corner of this date range box.
5. You’ll be greeted with a single dot on the time line showing a real-time visits number (mouse over the dot to see the number). All of the other stats (Site Usage, Visitors Overview, etc.) are also real-time numbers.

Now…if I can stop checking these stats every twenty minutes life will be good.

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