3vmike Posted January 23, 2009 Share Posted January 23, 2009 Ok so, I've got a brand new Aluminum MacBook with their 128gb SSD and I'm wondering if there are any tips or tricks to maximize battery life or performace. Anyone have any ideas? I've been googling for a while now and haven't found anything. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted January 23, 2009 Share Posted January 23, 2009 Does turning off bluetooth and wireless on the macbooks physically turn off the adapters? If so, turn them off when ever possible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deleted Posted January 23, 2009 Share Posted January 23, 2009 If you put the screen brightness to what you like it at, and then nudge it down a bit, it saves power and you really dont notice it being dimmer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nullArray Posted January 23, 2009 Share Posted January 23, 2009 Does turning off bluetooth and wireless on the macbooks physically turn off the adapters? If so, turn them off when ever possible. Yes. You can put the macbook into "better battery life" mode as well as dimming the display and turning off Airport/Blutooth. In extreme cases, disabling indexing can help too (I think), but I don't recommend that. There's a checkbox in the energy saver preferences to put the hard disks to sleep whenever possible. Apple's official suggestions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3vmike Posted January 23, 2009 Author Share Posted January 23, 2009 Thanks for the recomendations guys. Is there any particular way I should format the drive when doing a fresh install... IE Journaled, Not Journaled. Anything like that? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nullArray Posted January 23, 2009 Share Posted January 23, 2009 Whoa whoa whoa, why are you reformatting the drive? Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is recommended. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3vmike Posted January 23, 2009 Author Share Posted January 23, 2009 Whoa whoa whoa, why are you reformatting the drive? Mac OS Extended (Journaled) is recommended. I'm not necessarily, just trying to understand the tech similarities/differences and how to capitalize on the hardware I've been given. I've got Winxp running with bootcamp and just thought about it as I was doing the install. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted January 23, 2009 Share Posted January 23, 2009 Not journalled (the mac equivalent of using ext2 instead of ext3 i guess) will result in less hard drive use which in theory means more battery. Unlikely this would actually be noticeable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Razor512 Posted January 23, 2009 Share Posted January 23, 2009 one way I have found to get extra battery life is to use a os that is less resource intensive when ever possible. for example on my friends laptop he gets about 2 hours battery life with windows vista, on ubuntu he gets 2.5-3 hours, a less bloated OS takes less work to do the same job so it uses less power) not sure how resource intensive the mac os is but other than disabling stuff, you may also want to dual boot a less intensive os for use when you know you will be away from a charger for a while Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nullArray Posted January 23, 2009 Share Posted January 23, 2009 I'm not necessarily, just trying to understand the tech similarities/differences and how to capitalize on the hardware I've been given. I've got Winxp running with bootcamp and just thought about it as I was doing the install. There isn't much added performance to using SSDs with any major operating system right now, according to Slashdot. Even still, I doubt formatting would give you any major improvements,... it'd probably have more to do with OS optimization. But of course, I know nothing of this and am basing this on wild conjecture. Personally, at this point in time, I think the $600 you spent on the drive was a waste. For $500 less, you could have gotten a drive that's 2.5 times the capacity, and those are with Apple's insane BTO prices. Especially considering in one or two years, that drive will probably be $500 cheaper..., blah. Just my opinion. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3vmike Posted January 24, 2009 Author Share Posted January 24, 2009 There isn't much added performance to using SSDs with any major operating system right now, according to Slashdot. Even still, I doubt formatting would give you any major improvements,... it'd probably have more to do with OS optimization. But of course, I know nothing of this and am basing this on wild conjecture. Personally, at this point in time, I think the $600 you spent on the drive was a waste. For $500 less, you could have gotten a drive that's 2.5 times the capacity, and those are with Apple's insane BTO prices. Especially considering in one or two years, that drive will probably be $500 cheaper..., blah. Just my opinion. Well then I guess it's a good thing my Job purchased the MacBook for me ;-D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingwray Posted January 24, 2009 Share Posted January 24, 2009 There isn't much added performance to using SSDs with any major operating system right now, according to Slashdot. Even still, I doubt formatting would give you any major improvements,... it'd probably have more to do with OS optimization. But of course, I know nothing of this and am basing this on wild conjecture. Personally, at this point in time, I think the $600 you spent on the drive was a waste. For $500 less, you could have gotten a drive that's 2.5 times the capacity, and those are with Apple's insane BTO prices. Especially considering in one or two years, that drive will probably be $500 cheaper..., blah. Just my opinion. Your missing one big point about SSDs, reliability. You drop that laptop and no physically damage is done to the SSD then your data will still be their. In the case of the hard drive, the shock could very well have killed it. Is it worth the money, well I suppose that depends on what your data's worth. On another note, hopefully Snow Leopard will bring lots of nice benefits to using things like SSDs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3vmike Posted January 25, 2009 Author Share Posted January 25, 2009 Your missing one big point about SSDs, reliability. You drop that laptop and no physically damage is done to the SSD then your data will still be their. In the case of the hard drive, the shock could very well have killed it. Is it worth the money, well I suppose that depends on what your data's worth. On another note, hopefully Snow Leopard will bring lots of nice benefits to using things like SSDs. They say that Snow Leopard will bring a lot of under the hood improvements. I can only hope that one of them is SSD optimization. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Razor512 Posted January 25, 2009 Share Posted January 25, 2009 but there is 1 problem with SSD, they give no warning when they are dying, they just stop working since they use flash memory, you basically see the problem as it working fine 1 moment and the next it is dead or most of the data disappears Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted January 25, 2009 Share Posted January 25, 2009 but there is 1 problem with SSD, they give no warning when they are dying, they just stop working since they use flash memory, you basically see the problem as it working fine 1 moment and the next it is dead or most of the data disappears I would have thought that SSDs would use SMART to inform the computer exactly of it's current states (since it knows exactly what state it is in). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
h3%5kr3w Posted January 25, 2009 Share Posted January 25, 2009 yes, im sure it does to some extent, but i see what they mean by 1 minute it can work, the next it doesnt. The actual memory of the ssd may never fault, but the battery that keeps information IN memory could be going out or a faulty connection which could mean automatic loss or corruption of everything in memory. This is one of the reasons why I though ssd was a GOOD idea, just not RIGHT NOW. Because let's face it, lets say you have an ssd for about 5 years, and you have alot of stuff on it. On a regular hdd you would think at least to back up your stuff and as long as the actuator motor and spindle motor didnt go out completely, your data should be safe, and you can notice sometimes when an hdd goes out (the click, click sound, or loud, vibration sounds, or intermittent power issues, etc) but when an ssd goes out, it just does and it's shot, on the spot most probably without any hope of data recovery because it is an all connected system. Think of it like this: A parallel of lightbulbs (ie. hdd) - is information or media (in this case lightbulbs...) that are singly connected to a source, and each one of them has a connection. As long as the source is working, media is accessable.(or if one light bulb goes out, the others stay on.) A series of lightbulbs (ie. SSD) - is electronic memory (also in this case lightbulbs) that are connected to each other, and the first light bulb (or single bit of memory) is connected to the source, and the last light bulb (or the last single bit of memory) is connected to the source, and if one lightbulb (or one bit of memory) shorts out, then ALL of the memory goes out. This may not be 100% accurate, but hey you figure it out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingwray Posted January 25, 2009 Share Posted January 25, 2009 but there is 1 problem with SSD, they give no warning when they are dying, they just stop working since they use flash memory, you basically see the problem as it working fine 1 moment and the next it is dead or most of the data disappears Quite the opposite actually. Yes there are parts that can fail on them which take the whole SSD out but thats no more likely than on a HDD. As SSDs degrade with age they shrink in size as parts of them become unusable. They also move data around and can recover data lost most of the time using similar techniques your HDD does when it encounters a fault (which on modern drives is a lot). So you lose capacity slowly but your data will be safe. I suppose this is assuming that you haven't got the drive 100% full which would be stupid anyway. Interesting its also this process that makes many data forensic tools completely useless on SSDs, because their logical mapping to physical mapping is continual changing and SSDs don't allow you that information. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3vmike Posted January 25, 2009 Author Share Posted January 25, 2009 I've also heard that SSD's are made larger than their reported size to counteract this phenomenon. Also, if your that paranoid about loosing your data, you should probably be backing it up.\ To be honest had I been purchasing this macbook I don't think I would get the SSD, I prefer the larger drive space, but I figure now that I have it I might as well get the most out of it I can. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Razor512 Posted January 25, 2009 Share Posted January 25, 2009 for the price of 1 SSD you can buy like 6-10 regular HDD's and an large external drive to perform regular backups to Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingwray Posted January 25, 2009 Share Posted January 25, 2009 for the price of 1 SSD you can buy like 6-10 regular HDD's and an large external drive to perform regular backups to Show me a regular hard drive which you can shake violently while it continues to perform at its normal performance and not loose any data on. You need to stop thinking of SSDs and HDDs being the same. The perform the same operation, but have very different qualities. If you don't want to pay the premium at the moment for an SSD, thats fine, but many people do because of the benefits and they don't require 6-10 normal hard drives to store all their data. One benefit what I would love is the stupidly low response times and the silent operation. I'm just waiting for Apple to refresh the Air again, hopefully with a bit more grunt and a 256GB SSD. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3vmike Posted January 25, 2009 Author Share Posted January 25, 2009 One think I do like is having the invisishield on the macbook and being able to be a little more rough and tough with it having the ssd. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
h3%5kr3w Posted January 26, 2009 Share Posted January 26, 2009 i have to agree with stingwray, the access speed alone really makes it worth the price, the issue for me is affordability. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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