Operation: Phoenix Revival Part 3: The Hardest Part

You would think installing Lion on a fresh solid state drive would be easy, and in my case, you would be wrong.

Allow me to explain.

Shortly after Lion was available from the Mac App Store, I downloaded a copy and made a bootable disc. That disc, which worked fine on my Mac Pro, came up as “unrecognized” by my Macbook Pro when I attempted to install Lion onto it.

Let me start by saying that if Lion came out as a DVD option for $29.99, I would have bought it. Call me old school, but I actually like to have physical copies of operating systems, particularly where clean installs are involved. (Now get off my lawn!)

Anyway, my plans for having a clean install of Lion on my early 2008 Macbook Pro were dashed. Instead, I had to first install Snow Leopard from disc, and then apply the Snow Leopard combo-updater. (Incidentally, the Macbook Pro’s SuperDrive had no problem reading the Snow Leopard disc, so I’m thinking there may be a problem with the drive reading non-commercially burned discs.)

With Snow Leopard 10.6.8 installed, I spent several head-scratching minutes trying to figure out how to re-download Lion from the Mac App Store. Honestly, how hard would it be for Apple to just include a “re-download” button next to all your purchases? Eventually, after wielding my Google-fu, I found the solution: Hold down Option next to the Purchases button.

Of course, that didn’t work for me initially… I spent several frustrating minutes trying to coax the Mac App Store to let me to download Lion. Then I had an epiphany. I ejected the external drives that were connected to my Macbook Pro and – BOOM! – I was finally able to download and install Lion. Again, not intuitive.

Lion installed in about 20 minutes. Boot up time was fast – so scary fast that I couldn’t believe it. So I rebooted the Macbook Pro again to see if it was real. Thankfully, it was. Here’s the video:

Here’s a video of the same Macbook Pro with its original 5400 RPM hard drive:

Unfortunately, the video cuts off at 1 minute, 30 seconds (because of Flickr’s video size restrictions), but boot-up time clocked in at 2 minutes 29 seconds with the standard hard drive, compared to a mere 40 seconds on the SSD.

Not only are boot times screaming fast, so are application launch times. I didn’t measure these numerically, but I can say emphatically that across the board, apps launched much faster on the SSD than they did on the standard hard drive. Overall, my Macbook Pro feels much more responsive. It was worth all the effort of taking apart my Macbook Pro, and if I had to do the procedure all over again, I would. It’s given my Macbook Pro a new lease on life; I can use it for at least another two more years.

The short of it is this: Installing the OWC Mercury Extreme solid state drive in an early 2008 Macbook Pro take some patience and time, but the results are so incredibly worth it. The SSD transplant has given my early 2008 Macbook Pro a swift kick in the pants. So much so, that it feels like a brand new machine now. If I had to find one quibble to complain about, it would be: Why the heck did I wait so long to perform this upgrade?

-Krishna

Next: Starting from Scratch: A closer look at the apps which made the cut onto my new SSD.