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Thursday, September 27, 2012

Operation HotRod My Computer

Operation HotRod my Mac is beginning... These are the goodies that soon will grace the innards of my trusty MacBook Pro. Its still a nice machine, but just needs a bit of a bump. I'm struck by how much this project resembles the hotrodding projects of my youth. One of my buddies would get a car, which of course needed a bit of juicing up to be much much faster. So they would get out the J.C. Whitney catalog, or get with another gear head friend and acquire a high rise manifold, A big 'ol four barrel carburator, a set of headers and glass pack mufflers. A little wrench work, some swearing and bleeding and some illicit beers later, the beater was made into a beast, much faster and ready for drag racing down old 40 highway.

 So what does this possibly have to do with a computer? Well all those bolt on parts served one purpose really - to get more fuel and air into and out of the engine, increasing its power. In the IT geek community we call this IO - input/output. The faster you can get them bits into the storage device, and back out of it into RAM where it can work for you the better! Just by replacing a spinning hard drive with an SSD or Solid State Drive, data moves much, much faster - quicker startups, better response, even faster downloads! Its an easy update and will make quite a difference.

 My plan is to remove my optical drive, replace it with an adapter that allows a hard drive to be mounted in that space, and install an SSD where the old hard drive was. My optical drive will go into an enclosure so it can still be used for the rare occasion I need to access optical media. Stay tuned here, I'll document the hotrodding process, I know you are all on pins and needles to wait for me to go out on 'ol 40 and open 'er up.

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