Updating my MacBook Pro from HDD to Crucial m4 SSD using Time Machine and Mac OS X Lion

Finally I upgraded my Mid 2010 MacBook Pro with a nice Crucial m4 SSD with 512GB. I was thinking about changing my hard drive for month but now the price dropped from 600 to 400 EUR and I went for it.

It took a little while to collect relevant informations so I want to share a workflow:

  1. Backup your complete system with time machine!
  2. Swap your drives (ifixit.com) without touching your battery.
  3. Check if your SSD runs the newest firmware and upgrade if necessary.
  4. Boot from your OS X Lion recovery partition (hold ALT key on Mac startup).
  5. Use the disk utility to restore from time machine.
  6. Go outside or hang out with friends or family!
  7. Enable trim support in OS X Lion for your SSD.

Done.

Since a couple of days it really makes fun using my MacBook Pro again. It dropped packaging time for a 1,5 GB big IPA file with ADT from 12 to almost 6 minutes. This is a huge benefit, so if you’re still using normal HDDs for daily work I recommend switching to SSD as soon as possible!

UPDATE – added xbench results:

Name Score Detail
System Info    
  Xbench Version   1.3
  System Version   10.7.4 (11E53)
  Physical RAM   8192 MB
  Model   MacBookPro6,2
  Drive Type   M4-CT512M4SSD2
Disk Test 409.65  
Sequential 253.88  
  Uncached Write 405.78 249.14 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write 324.52 183.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read 128.80 37.69 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read 408.86 205.49 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 1060.10  
  Uncached Write 1452.92 153.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Write 608.33 194.75 MB/sec [256K blocks]
  Uncached Read 2231.07 15.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
  Uncached Read 1007.15 186.88 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Safari Flash Player detection problems with ClickToFlash

I really like the concept of blocking Flash, mainly because I don’t see these unwanted, crappy developed Flash adds sucking performance, but also because it’s a nice way to recognise Flash parts in websites. You’ll have your own reasons.

Safari is, except for testing purposes, my browser of choice, but I was having trouble on different websites accessing Flash content because the Flash plugin was not detected correctly. Since I had to update the Flash Player on my system again, I decided to figure out what the problem is.

According to Playerversion.com an older Flash Player version – MAC 10,0,45,0 – was found first, then the display switched to my installed Flash version – MAC 10,3,181,14 (Debug player).

I used the Flash Player Uninstaller but Flash Player version MAC 10,0,45,0 was still displayed in Safari.

After some research I figured out that ClickToFlash doesn’t display the correct Flash Player version and therefore doesn’t work in all Flash detection scripts. Just check Safari - Help - Installed Plugins and search for "Flash" and you’ll see that ClickToFlash simulates somehow an outdated Flash Player version (seems to be hardcoded).

So until ClickToFlash will be updated displaying the correct installed Flash Player version I’ll use AdBlock For Safari. More Flash but less problems – hopefully. 🙂

Setting up my new MacBook Pro

A few days ago my new my new antiglare 15″ i7 MacBook Pro arrived and I decided to manually setup this new system. Rethinking everything is always a good opportunity to leave some old stuff behind.

Before I bought my first MacBook Pro in late 2006 I owned PCs only and so I still used Thunderbird on my Mac until now. But it wasn’t that easy to bring all my old local stored mails into Mail. It worked quite well but for some reasons it didn’t work for every folder. For example one folder contained 2364 emails but Mail was only importing 653. I tried it several times but I had to use my IMAP account to transfer these mails into this new environment. That took really a little while for several folders.

Maybe it’s not necessary but since my new user account uses the same username and password I had no problem to simply copy & paste data for Adium, Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, iTunes and Skype.

I also decided to upgrade or switch to newer software like OmniFocus, Parallels Desktop 5, Transmit and Versions. And of course a fresh version of FDT Enterprise is still my favorite application.

Luckily Adobe shipped the new Creative Suite 5 today and so hopefully there’s no need to install CS 4 products anymore.

My last step is refining my directory structure and then I’m looking forward to work with this machine for the next 3 or 4 years with hardware video encoding and 8 GB RAM.

But the biggest question is: Which sticker will I use to hide the big apple?

Update – 2011.09.15. Finally I made a decision:

Mac – Local Server Development Basics

Since I had to figure out some basics about local server development on my Mac, I really recommend these tools:

  • MAMP – Apache and MySQL Server
  • Virtual Host X – Create up to 3 virtual host with the free version.
    In other words: This provides an easy to use GUI which enables you to forward an local URL like “http://myProject.local” to your workspace directory.

But one thing sucks: You have to set read/write access (in finder) for everyone. I wonder if that might cause system security problems?

And I strongly recommend to read this nice tutorial about setting up virtual hosts manually: http://www.sawmac.com/mamp/virtualhosts/