SSD. Which choices and how to implement?

Dear All!

I would like to add SSD memory to my MBPI have a 2009 MBP 2,26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, 500 GB HD. It always ran fine but since a couple of months it's starting to slow down. I heard some things about that taking out your regular harddrive and replacing it with SSD memory really speeds up the performance of your mac.

My problem is that it's expensive, so my questions are:
- what is the best and cheapest solution to speed up my mac?
- where can i buy good and cheap SSD memort?
- how can i install SSD memory?

Thanks very much!

It's not "memory" it is "storage." That's important to make sure when you talk to folks you get the right answer. OWC is a good, reputable vendor of SSDs for MBPs, and they have online videos to show you what to do. However, if your machine has slowed down, there may be other causes that are probably worth exploring. Did you change anything a couple of months ago that may have triggered the slowdown? (Install something new?) Have you tried running a maintenance program like ONYX to clear up the clutter? And look at Activity Monitor to see how your memory is going (of particular note is Page Outs and Swap usage. They both should be as low as possible. You may do better in performance upgrading the memory, rather than storage.

And how full is the hard drive? Over 75-80% capacity used causes slow down big time.

harryb2448 said:

And how full is the hard drive? Over 75-80% capacity used causes slow down big time.

Click to expand...

SSD drives are utterly unaffected by capacity available (unless of course they run out entirely)..

conventional drives which have been run out of space are going to become heavily fragmented, causing performance to drop tremendously.

I've helped numerous clients lately with "Hybrid" SSD drives (also called SSHD).. These are a somewhat slower conventional drive, mated to a small SSD drive.. The result is NEARLY as fast a drive as SSD, but at a fraction of the cost.

Personally, I've got a SataIII SSD in a 2012 Macbook Pro (2.66ghz). and with a bit of tweaking, it outperforms a standard Retina Macbook Pro.. yes, it really does.. But it's also a $2500 setup, with tons of tweaking done.

For the average Mac user, an SSHD is going to be NEARLY as fast for common uses (boot, open app, open doc, print, surf, etc)..


Pros:
- 1. speed of boot/access/regular stuff - -85% that of SSD
- 2 low cost.. For example, a 500gb SSD is ~$375.. a 500gb SSHD is $80

Cons
- SSHD is slightly lower RPM (usually 5400)
- SSHD has GREAT burst speed, but not really that great for continuous data xfer

Essentially the hard chip component seems to learn what you access regularly, so iit stores that part.. So your system boot and access time is stunningly fast.. But if you're copying huge files, it's not going to be that tremendous..

I highly recommend it if you're on a budget.. Nothing beats a full-blown SSD. But if you've got $100 instead of $1000, the SSHD is an admirable alternative.

I compared one of my clients Macs to my own the other day.. his was a 2.53 Macbook Pro with 8gb of RAM. Mine a 2.66 Macbook pro with 16gb.

I put an SSHD in his machine, then cleaned it up a bit...

Boot time on the 2.53 was about 18 seconds to desktop, with SataII SSHD (5400rpm)
Boot time on my 2.66 was about 10 seconds to dekstop (with SataIII SSD)

Compare these speeds to a conventional drive--usual boot time of 40-60 seconds, depending..

When comparing machines, I'd say the guy who does casual usage will be far happier with an SSHD for a fraction of the cost..

VAMountineer ... are you sure you're not me? Because I could have written that post!!