UniversalWolf, id like to hear about your new upgrade.
I finally got my SSD this morning. It's a 250GB Crucial MX200. Unfortunately I was on my way to a funeral so it had to wait...
When I got home I popped open my Apricorn Velocity Solo x2, and put the SSD on it. This was very easy. The Velocity comes in simple, clear plastic packaging with a blue and white and red paper insert. Make sure to examine the insert carefully, since it folds over and it has lots of useful information printed on the inside as well as the outside.
The Velocity card had a tiny plastic bag with four small mounting screws. This was taped to the card itself. Oddly, my SSD had holes for the mounting screws around the outside edge rather than on the lower face, so they didn't match up with the screw holes in the card. I put the screws in the SSD anyway because I thought it might keep dust out of the holes, at least. I fastened the SSD to the card using the tape from the mounting screw bag. This was the strangest part of the whole process, but I actually think it will work just fine. If it makes a difference to you, you could check the SSD you're buying closely to see where the mounting screw holes are located. I never even thought of that.
I took the side panel off my MacPro, cleaned out some dust just to be tidy, and proceeded to put the Velocity card in the second PCI slot, right above my Radeon HD 5770 GPU. Honestly, it didn't
look like it was going to fit at first glance. After I had loosened the spring-loaded finger screws and removed the metal mounting bracket at the back of the case, however, the card slid into place almost effortlessly. The middle screw on the mounting bracket was positioned right over the base plate of the Velocity card, so it's fixed in place very securely.
I should note that the Velocity card did not block the fan on my GPU at all. I don't foresee the SSD card impacting cooling or airflow much at all.
I replaced the side panel, plugged everything back in, and booted up. OSX had no trouble at all with the SSD. I formatted it and there it was on my desktop, ready to use. If you just want to use it as a data drive, that's all there is to it. That's also as far as I've gotten. I didn't have time to do anything else today.
The next step is to try and set it up as a boot drive. I can see that, if there are going to be any problems, this is where they will most likely occur. OSX recognizes the drive as external, or at least different from a regular hard drive. You can tell because the volume appears on the desktop with the orange drive icon rather than the grey hard drive icons. The Velocity's paper insert and the Apricorn website have some helpful advice concerning this issue. I'll be doing some experiments tonight and tomorrow to see if I can get it working.
So far things seem to be working very well, so I'm hopeful. This is all in Snow Leopard (because I'm hopelessly outdated in most ways).
