Saturday, August 18, 2012

Upgrading my Macbook Pro (Early 2011)

Currently I run a Macbook Pro with 2 HD's (120 GB Intel 3GB/s SSD and a 700GB 7200 RPM with 4GB stock Apple RAM dual booted between OSX Mountain Lion and Windows 7.

Today I ordered a few parts for my yearly upgrade.

The Upgrade:
1. Chuck in 16 GB Ram - GSkill (1.5V) 2 x 8GB. $100 AUD - G.SKILL 16GB (2 x 8G) 204-Pin SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Laptop Memory F3-10600CL9D-16GBSQ
2. 512 GB Crucial M4 SSD in the main disk bay. $435 inc shipping Crucial 512 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT512M4SSD2
3. External case for 700GB $25

The plan:
Move the 120GB to the opti-bay slot. As the CD Drive bay as a max through put of 3GBs on the 2011 mbp's.
Use Clonezilla to take a full image of the Bootcamp partition OSX and Win7 partitions on the 120GB
Chuck in the 512GB.
Restore the bootcamp osx/ntfs image to the 512GB. Create a partition for OSX and win7( Exfat), move all of the tools/apps/games that were installed on the 700GB to the respective drive.
Partition the 120 to 80GB HFS+ and 40 EXFat.

As long as I can get the state logically the same as before I'll be in a good position, the 120GB is over a year old so I'm happy to move my most critical work related tools to the new faster bigger SSD, demote the intel 120GB to a file storage device and use the 700 GB as my backup HD.

OSX Will look like:
OS Drive - 128 GB - {XCode, Photoshop, Documents, Tools}
HFS Data - 128 GB - {iTunes, Downloads}
EXFat 80GB - {Media (TV Shows etc)}

Windows 7 Will look like:
C:\ 128 GB NTFS {Visual Studio/Photoshop/ Anything that doesn't need registry key changes}
D:\ 128 GB EXFat {Steam games}
E:\ 40 GB ExFat {Downloads}

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