Classic British Flight Sim

Just a heads up chaps. One of my colleagues has just pointed out that Samsung 1TB ssd's on amazon are a £289! The 500GB are just under £160. Might be useful for some. Can't believe how much the price is coming down.

Not before time either, and another way to think about it is that HDD's should plummet.

Much as I don't like Amazon, not a bad thing, if it helps drop prices elsewhere as well...

Found the ones you're talking about Ben, that is starting to look attractive now.

I'm actually looking around just for such a drive, because I was contemplating swapping the 750Gb hard disk out of the Macbookpro I have for an SSD to speed it up.

Here's a question for you Ben which you might be able to help with, do you happen to know if SSD drives will handle partitions with two operating systems with the same success same as normal HD drives? I've the Macbook Pro's drive partitioned with MacOSX on one partition and Windows 7 on the other and I can boot to either using bootcamp, can the SSD handle the same split without issues?

Any tips very much appreciated...

Hi Gordon,

The SSD is no different to other drives in the respect of multiple partitions. I'm not sure how you would go about reinstalling OSX on one though, not sure if Apple do something funny with the boot sectors to stop you using generic bits, and thus forcing you to buy their bits at greatly inflated prices. They certainly used to do that back in the day.

Hi Ben, I don't think there's any restrictions on drives or memory, I've just easily upgraded its RAM to 8gb from Crucial . The ram that was in the MacBook Pro was Samsung branded SODIMM. The Crucial stuff is branded as theirs but is boxed as MAC compatible & if you order two modules they make sure you get two matched chips for compatability. There's plenty of chat on mac forums about fitting 3rd party ssd drives as long as you use drive cloning software to clone the drive correctly, what I haven't found yet is any tips or advice re cloning both partitions onto 1 drive but keeping the boot camp setup working so you can boot from either without having to reinstall anything. Interesting stuff though.

What was worrying me was whether ssd drives need special management applications and whether having now separate os partitions might confuse the apps or limit their use.

I'll keep the thread updated if I find out more, there's bound to be others here which might be interested

SSD's are direct swaps for HDD's, just remember not to defrag them. Other than that they are completely interchangeable, so no worries on that front. The only thing to be aware of is the speed of the interface, recent Macs are SATA3 (6 Gbps) but older ones will Only be SATA 2 (3Gbps)

Cheers Ben, the Macbook Pro I have is SATA3 so should be a nice swap if I can get both partitions cloned over ...

Mist drive clone products do it at block level, meaning they mirror the drive exactly. They don't actually read the format of the data, they just look at it as basic 1's and 0's; its a duplicate.

Could I use that with the 250gig OCZ Ben? I'm still not sure what to do with it or for that matter, the 125gig it will replace

ATB
DaveB