To begin with, I acquired an OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB SSD and installed it in my 2010 MacBook Pro. I had been waiting for a while to do this move, particularly because I find the optical drive of marginal use and decided to try an OptiBay adapter which would let me use the optical drive’s space as an other 2.5″ bay for whatever I wanted. More on that later, but I moved the MBP’s rather generic 5400 RPM 500 GB traditional platter drive into this optibay space, and stuck the 120 GB Vertex 2 where the HDD was.

Just get to how you did it already!

Cloning the drive onto the SSD was easy, everything works fine, but I was left with that generic and somewhat ugly mechanical hard disk drive icon that OS X has stuck with since forever.

First, I set out to create an appropriate SSD icon. Getting a Vertex 2 image was pretty simple, and I cleaned it up, cropped it, and added the appropriate clipping mask/alpha channel (depending what name suits you) for transparency. It’s a nice big PNG here:

Vertex 2 SSD by OCZ

The next step was changing the icon. It used to be trivially simple in OS 9 to do this, but things got a bit more complicated in OS X. To do so, I found a program named (aptly enough) “Set Icon” you can get here.

Set Icon for OS X

Pretty straightforward. Select the drive, drag an icon in, and click set icon.

Now you’ll have something like this:

Mac SSD

Looks pretty good alongside the old icon, if I may say so myself: Pretty simple, right? Enjoy!

• A presentation I put together for an IEEE student contest. It details (in a high level fashion) the installation, benefits, and driver modification required to install an MTRON 7000 SSD in an intel 965 platform. PDF: SSD Installation in Intel 965 platform for IEEE student contest

• The original documentation prepared for the Imaging Technology Laboratory detailing installation of the MTRON 7000 SSD. It details all the driver modification necessary to enable AHCI and subsequent full throughput of the SSD on the ICH8 platform: Mtron_SSD

• Curving a CCD, Overview and Goals: Technical Note 1. A basic overview of the considerations, challenges, and state of progress regarding field-matching CCD curvature. This document should serve as a primer for why this line of work is both relevant, and important: Curving_CCD_Report

• Twitter Exploration for AI Lab: Feasibility study for spidering, social network analysis, and further research. A primer for what the service is, how it works, how it looks, and how we can leverage it for business intelligence. PPTX: Twitter Exploration, Twitter Update

• ECE 372 microprocessors organization and design final project. This is another Beamer class compiled presentation which details the design and construction of a network appliance monitor and restarter: Final Report Presentation