Comments on: MacBook Pro 256GB SSD upgrade experience

By: Timothy Nguyen

Timothy Nguyen — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:29:36 +0000

Wonderful write-up!

I’ve just installed a new Crucial M4 in my mid-2009 MBP 5,3 after reading this blog post. One thing I’ve noticed though is that, under the System Profiler, it lists the “negotiated link speed” as 1.5Gbps instead of 3.0Gbps. Has anyone else noticed this? My mac is fully updated (OS 10.6.8).

By: Nicholas Johnson

Nicholas Johnson — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 07:34:28 +0000

Thanks for your post. I was surprised that the performance improvement was not assive, as I’ve been toying with the idea of replacing my main hdd with an ssd for a while. I have a 2008 Santa Rosa 17″ Macbook Pro (which I love) maxed out at 4Gb.

Like other people here, yesterday I replaced my superdrive with a 5400 1Tb Optibay, and I’m very pleased with the results. I’ve moved 160Gb of stuff off my primary hdd (my home folder) and now everything is swishy fast again, plus I don’t need to worry about downloading lots of podcasts, running VMs or filling up the scratch disks when photoshopping.

I was very impressed with the Optibay, super easy to install, and it came with a free enclosure for the old superdrive. Rather ironically though, the instructions were supplied on CD :)

By: Ankur Jain

Ankur Jain — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 01:28:40 +0000

Damien
Very impressive guide on the SSD’s. I have been (the fact I am here!) scouring the forums for information on installing a ssd on my mac. I have a mid-2009 13″ MacBook Pro 2.53 GHz (4gb ram) , same generation as Scott above. Recently I have noticed 2 issues, the never ending plagues –
1. Slow computer using Aperture, stumbled upon the nifty Activity Monitor to realize I had 41 megs free ram left – yikes, shocking since I thought 4 gigs would be enough to last me a lifetime! Thankfully, I can upgrade to 8gigs.
2. 250 hdd is running low on space – I have a 80 gb aperture library and another 80gb itunes collection.
I have been toying with the idea of replacing my hdd with a faster, bigger one and have scrunched on the idea of jumping onto the ssd bandwagon owing to he high costs. Last night I stumbled upon a an article on OWC that opened my mind to repacing the superdrive slot to a second drive. I started toying with the following config and hence had some questions. By the way, I loved your primer on the usb install disk if you dont have a superdrive – will be my case soon!

My ideas on the new config – replace the existing 250gb, 5400rpm hdd with a 600gb 7200rpm for data storage and use a ssd as the boot drive and for installing applications.

Q’s -

1.Should the ssd be in the slot the hdd is or is it ok to be in the ‘optical drive’ position.
2.I think my system is still a 3Gbps, which amongst the OWC vs the crucial vs ocz vertex 2 should I try since they are very similar price ranges?
3.Would it slow down aperture to use application launch from the ssd and data from the hdd? Same for itunes. How does the dual drive sonfiguration work for this scenario?

Any help would be awesome. Thanks to Scott for sharing his insight into the OWC install with the 13″.

Ankur

By: Scott Boydman

Scott Boydman — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:41:13 +0000

Damien, just wanted to thank you for a great post!

I came across your article around September, 2010, and after doing a lot of research, I purchased an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 120 GB for my mid-2009 13″ MacBook Pro 2.26 GHz. At the same time, I upgraded RAM from 2 to 4 GB. I’d like to share some experiences with you. The installation of drive and RAM were a piece of cake. I easily restored my system from my Time Machine Backup. Performance was very good, but I experienced the Hibernation lockup that was known to occur with the Sandforce SSD Controller chipset. Undeterred, I initially disabled Hibernation by issuing sudo commands in Terminal. Ultimately, I downloaded and installed the SmartSleep pref panel (now available as an app through the Mac App Store, and highly recommended for users with SSD boot drives. I also configured the system to disable last-access time and confirmed it’s operation by entering “mount” in Terminal (noatime is displayed for the boot drive parameters).

Several weeks ago, OWC posted a firmware update that cures the Hibernation ills that plagued this drive and Mac OS. Since there as yet was no Mac OS firmware updater (though it should be available soon), I temporarily installed Windows 7 using Boot Camp just for this purpose. The firmware update was non-destructive. Hibernation issues were cured. SmartSleep is now set to sleep until 20% power level, then hibernate. This saves time, but protects your data — a great compromise. I initially disabled the Motion Sensor, but after lots of research, I decided to reenable it, without seeing any “stuttering” in video playback.

So far, so good. But here is my best modification up to this point. I happened to return to your post, and noticed your update concerning TRIM with Mac OS X 10.6.7. I followed your link and downloaded the TRIM Support Enabler v1.1. Once the patch was installed and working, I followed suggestions to erase the SSD’s free space using Disk Utility, and entered the 3 Terminal commands that were listed. When I rebooted the second time, the boot process seemed to be much faster. In fact, before enabling TRIM support, the boot process needed about 14 revolutions of the progress gear that appears beneath the Apple logo. Following TRIM enabling, the progress gear only requires about 5 revolutions for the boot — improved by a factor of 3! I am ecstatic with the performance of my MacBook Pro, having seen improvement in battery life (by the way, if you haven’t seen it, check out “Watts” Battery Utility by Binary Tricks), reduced noise and heat, and confidence that my data won’t be destroyed by dropping my laptop. My experience has been better than I expected!

Sorry for being long-winded, but I thought you and your readers might be interested in my experience. And thanks again for updating your great post!

By: Marie

Marie — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 22:43:53 +0000

Just wanted to say Thank you! Yes :) budget dictates. Mine for the MBP17 is $2500, give or take a smidgen if xtremely necessary. Im researching between 750 or 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 RPM -or- the 128 Solid State -also- wondering if I’d be foolish not to sincerely consider 2.3GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7 for the extra $250 -verses- the 2.2GHz. Im graveling at it all, but within the next 2 weeks I’ll be at the counter to purchase:) I’ll be using this for graphics and such. I would appreciate your thoughts.

By: Damien Guard

Damien Guard — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 19:11:10 +0000

1. You can replace your hard drive without invalidating your warranty providing you follow Apple's own instructions on how to do this. 2. That drive isn't a real solid state - it's a "hybrid" which has just 4 GB of flash to use as a buffer on top of it's traditional magnetic storage (hence why it's $119 for 500 GB and not $700). Performance doesn't look anywhere near as good as a real SSD. 3. No special set-up is required other than connecting it (shown in that Apple guide I linked to) and re-installing Mac OS X (or restoring a backup). [)amien

By: mark

mark — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 18:56:02 +0000

I have newer MacBook Pro 13inch. I dont want to invalidate AppleCare, but would like to move to SSD. Couple Questions:
1. Is the move “destructive” leaving trail preventing me from installing old drive and resuming AppleCare if needed?
2. CompUSA is advertising $119. 500Gb SSD. Price is great. How can I determine if this might fit / work?
- Seagate ST95005620AS Momentus XT 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive – 500GB, 7200 RPM, SATA 3Gb/s
3. Do most SSDs come with instructions (for Mac) that would guide me through and special set up?

Thanks! – Mark

By: rob

rob — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:56:03 +0000

To minimize unnecessary writes it looks like “don’t let your laptop run out of power” won’t do it. With the default settings, the RAM image is written to disk *every time* it goes to sleep. This is happening during the period the power light stays on solid after the display has switched off, before the power light goes into ‘breathing mode’. The result is that the battery can die and the image is there safe to recover from (unless you have a Sandforce 1200 controller drive like mine which doesn’t support hibernation but that’s another story). To disable the behaviour use ‘pmset -a hibernatemode 0′; if you -do- want to hibernate at some point, the best thing is to re-enable hibernation and hibernate, then disable it again (‘man pmset’). The Mac Air gets around this problem with a separate timer (accessed with pmset’s ‘deepsleepdelay’ option) which will trigger writing the RAM image to the ssd after a default 70 minute delay.

By: rob

rob — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:34:58 +0000

Thanks for a great page, I found it first when planning to put an ssd in the “broken” macbook pro 2.1 I was given recently. I did speed tests before and after my upgrade with dd though, went from 30 mbyte/s to 130 for both read and write — in line with your results, my block size and my ICH7-M controller I think. The great thing is, whether my ocz vertex2 magic garbage collection makes up for lack of TRIM or not, who cares? I can lose 40% of the drive speed and still be maxing out my interface :-)

By: David Goodman

David Goodman — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 23:55:47 +0000

i just fitted a crucial c300 256 ssd into my 2009 17″ macbook pro with a 500gb seagate HD in my optical drive slot. The difference is incredible everything is super fast and it finally feels like my computer can keep up with me.
Its very easy to fit the ssd drive and then restored my data from time machine