MacBook Pro Hacked With 64GB SSD

Pete Mortensen ()

Mbp-Ssd
In case you don’t speak Geeky Acronym, the gibberish above means that someone (in this case, Ryan Block of Engadget) has dropped a 64-gigabyte solid-state drive into a MacBook Pro. The incredible drives, which are still extremely expensive compared to conventional hard drives, use flash, not platters for storage, and as a result, have no noticeably moving parts. They’re virtually silent, and they’ve been claimed to up battery life to unheard of levels (I’ve heard 11 hours on a Toshiba subnotebook). Block hasn’t provided a battery life figure yet, but I’m kind of drooling. In two years, virtually all laptops will have moved in this direction…

Via Digg.

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Petemortensen

Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!

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Posted in Hardware Hacks, Macintosh |

  • http://www.igencomputers.com Goon

    Brilliant. Genius. Look for SSD’s in macs come January!! Or so the rumors say. Please, please get us the battery life numbers.

  • Jakob

    FR1ST!!!!!!!1!1

  • http://pinkybear.blogspot.com Jimmi

    So cool!

  • http://sikanrong.com sikanrong

    THIS IS AMAZING!! Please post the macbook battery life with the SSD drive; inquiring minds would like to know. Is this possible on the little white mactel macbooks, or just the titanium pro models?? SOMEONE FILL ME IN!!

  • Church of Apple

    I told you so

  • C Ontiveros

    I’m curious as to how the laptop world will turn when the Ion drives start to hit the market.

    http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/10/ion_memory

  • Nick

    That seems interesting…

    Still, I don’t think it could increase your battery life that much. The hard drive usually takes up under 1-2 watts, compared to 20-40 for the remainder of the computer. Unless you are somehow only using the hard drive, which wouldn’t do anything, there is no way you could extend the life that far. Regardless, those things are still too expensive to be better because of their quiet-ness and low power consumption. They go up to 5$ a gigabyte, compared to conventional ones, which often go down to 50 cents a gigabyte. I guess the read/write speeds might be a bit faster, but come on.

    Sorry to rain on your parade…. :)

  • http://kwirk.frih.net Najlaa

    (OヮO)
    I LOVE IT
    Ryan Block… he’s going to be a geek hero for decades to come…

  • Lionel Smith

    Big deal! What is “So cool!” about 64GB solid state drive? You cannot fit the operating system on this drive (let alone anything else), so it must have a conventional HDD as well. The two main things that kill the battery are the screen and the processor. The screen backlight draws a fair bit of current and the processor gets hot during operation. What do you think powers these? No wonder he hasn’t published battery life times. IT WOULD BE EVEN WORSE THAN IF HE HADN’T FITTED THE SOLID STATE DRIVE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

    “In two years, virtually all laptops will have moved in this direction…” – I’ll buy a larger capacity battery then!

  • http://prevailingwind.blogspot.com Tim

    I think a more practical application of a large-ish SSD would be in an iPod, where you could have the convenience and extended battery life of the Nano and Touch without the storage limitations. How small are these larger SSD drives being made?

  • miss_lain

    I could have given that MacBook Pro a good home. /cry

  • Huh

    “You cannot fit the operating system on this drive (let alone anything else)”

    64GB, not MB. You can fit quite a bit in 64GB.

    Oh, and “hacked”? As far as I know, the flash drives coming out meet the same specs as existing drives in terms of interface and size. I think to say it was “hacked” makes it sound much more difficult than it really is.

  • http://usmckillpoint.spruz.com iGeek Pro

    That is not a “hack” at all it is a matter of unplugging two cords unscrewing the drive the dropping in the SSD, screwing it in and plugging in the two cords. I’m eleven and I know that.