I’ve got an OCZ Vertex III SSD in my Macbook, which is awesome! Not so awesome: OCZ doesn’t provide firmware updaters that work on MacOS. Furthermore, recent Macbooks will only boot off internal drives (or via PXE netboot, which I’ve never been able to figure out) and getting them to boot from a linux partition is next to impossible. So, of course, the answer is Windows under BootCamp. Ah, but even that can’t be simple: the Windows-based updater needs to access the SATA SSD via AHCI, but BootCamp accesses your SATA disks through an IDE emulation layer…
- Temporarily remove the SSD, move the HDD from the superdrive bay back to where the SSD was, and reinstall the superdrive (BootCamp can only install from an internal drive).
- Boot from the HDD
- Run BootCamp and be sure to allocate plenty of disk to the new Windows partition. 30G won’t cut it; 40G should be enough. Windows update will chew up that much space when you bring the OS up-to-date. I ended up needing iPartition to get me past the .NET 4.0 update because I was too conservative.
- Let BootCamp install Windows 7 x64
- Put all your drives back where they started
- Order a new cable for the secondary disk because you flexed the original one into oblivion. You need to go to ebay because nobody has it in stock.
- Reboot with the option key down, boot into Windows, run Windows Update. Repeat until your eyes bleed.
- Try running OCZ toolbox from Windows and discover that it has no effect
- Find and follow this procedure to enable AHCI on the hard disk containing the BootCamp partition
- Run OCZ toolbox again; like magic, now it works!
It does seem faster, for what that’s worth. Dead ends included installing Ubuntu via Wubi from Windows and trying the linux-based updater. Because linux is installed in a file under NTFS mounted with loopback, of course it is subject to the same lack-of-AHCI problem. Might be worth looking into these Mac SSD hints, too, especially setting noatime.