Upgrading HD in Macbook Pro 3,1 to a SSD

Question

I am trying to upgrade my HD in my MBPro 3,1 from the original harddrive to a SSD drive from OWC.
I have done this already in  my  MBPro 4,1 without a hitch, but the 3,1 model, well it has been a royal pain.
When I installed the drive and I started to install Lion, the screen to install the software come up but I could not click on anything.  I rebooted several times and only once did I get to click on something.  It started the install and got to the point of selecting a drive to put it on and the SSD was not listed, only the USB drive was listed and of course it was locked.  After several attempts, I gave up and returned the first drive and got another one thinking the drive was bad.
When I got the second one and installed it, it reconized the drive and I formated it 'journaled" and then started the install.  It got almost to the end of the install and it said it had an error during install to restart it.  I did that and when I restarted it doesnt see the drive now.
I tried installing 10.6 and it has same problem.
In a nut shell, I can not get the MBPro to see that the SSD is there.  When I remove and put old HD back in it works fine.
Any suggestions on what I can do?
Thanks in advance
Chuck

Answer 1

It might be too old for SSD, stick a 7,200 RPM hard drive in there that will better match the hardware in terms of speed and capability. Your SATA is pretty old and you can't benefit from the full SSD speed anyway. You get more storage too with a hard drive, at a lower price per GB.
SSD is overkill for a lot of older machines, it's like putting a Ferrari engine in a VW bug.
With a 7,200 RPM drive, it's more like putting a freshly bored VW bug engine in a VW bug, a better match.
I've ran a pair of RAID 0 10,000 RPM boot drives in my PowerMac G5 for many years. My boot time was  20 seconds, my programs launched in one bounce instead of two, but still took the same time setting up programs.
Far as 99% other uses of the machine, it made little difference, only when I copied 10's of GB's of data, or cloned my RAID 0 to another RAID 0 as backup did I realize the performance benefits of fast storage, cut the time in half over a 7,200 RPM drive.
IMO if I could have 500GB of RAM and a RAM disk that was automatically copied from my SSD, then THAT would be a kickarse machine.
Everything instantly, no delay. (except the reboots would be slow loading 500GB into RAM of course)
So IMO those two machines you have, the 3,1 and the 4,1, would have been better off on 7,200 RPMs, saved yourself some money.
Check out MacTracker, they will tell you the SATA of those machines, you don't have the pipes for SSD.