Best SSD for Macbook Pro Mid 2010

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Hello,

I want to get a new SSD drive for a mid 2010 Macbook pro but I read that not all the drives are compatible.

What is the best fit?
 
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hi Sucrey

generally all SSD's would work as long as its a sata drive,

the only difference is the speed I have a late Mac mini 2009 and its running a Hynix 250gb ssd with no problems at all and is much quicker than the standard mechanical disk,

so you should be ok with any drive from Samsung to Hynix even crucial (to mention a few)
 
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Hello,

Thanks for your reply, I'm asking cuz I heard that they are some compatibility problems with some SSDs after a period of use and the speed got down to 1.5G from 6G at first.
 

krs


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The reduction in speed is not really a compatibility issue but more the nature of SSDs when the drive gets too full.
From what I have read so far, one needs to leave more empty space on an SSD than a spinner hard drive to maintain their read/write speed capability.
Why Solid-State Drives Slow Down As You Fill Them Up
 
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Lots of really bad information in that article. SSDs performance, compared to spinners, is really so much faster that any slowdown that might be caused by the drive having to do some data juggling is trivial. Spinners need a lot of space on them because they try to find a contiguous space to write the file, and if they cannot find that space, the heads have to move a lot more to spread the fragments of the file all around the discs. All those head moves take time, making the response time slow. That is why defragging a spinner can improve performance.

SSDs don't have to move any heads, don't really care about contiguous space because any address is equally accessible and fragmentation is meaningless. In fact, SSDs deliberately spread data around for what is known as wear-levelling, as the memory locations can only be used for a certain (really high) limited number of times. So the data is spread around to keep from hitting any one address too many times.

As a result of all that, SSDs actually don't need as much free space as do spinners. Generally you need to leave 10% free on a spinner, but an SSD will function quite nicely all the way to about 3%, although I would leave a bit more on a boot drive if your RAM is heavily used so that swapping always has room on the drive. Also, when the drive is idle, the controller does the cleanup of any partially used memory blocks or pages so that when the next write comes along, space is optimized and ready.

I will give the article some slack, it's seven years old. Technology moves on.
 

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I will give the article some slack, it's seven years old. Technology moves on.

Man - I hate that when google brings up hits on their first page that are essentially "ancient" in this day and age.
I usually check, but I didn't this time - one would think google would be smart enough to rank more recent articles higher in their search results

Jake -thanks for those details:
As a result of all that, SSDs actually don't need as much free space as do spinners. Generally you need to leave 10% free on a spinner, but an SSD will function quite nicely all the way to about 3%, although I would leave a bit more on a boot drive if your RAM is heavily used so that swapping always has room on the drive. Also, when the drive is idle, the controller does the cleanup of any partially used memory blocks or pages so that when the next write comes along, space is optimized and ready.

However, there was a bit of a discussion about free space required on drives and Randy seemed to have quite a different opinion - it was basically keep 20% or better free on either SSD or spinner.

Also begs the question why SSDs slow down so dramatically and what causes that.
See post #3
....some SSDs after a period of use and the speed got down to 1.5G from 6G at first.

I only have one 2017 Mac with an SSD so have basically no first-hand experience how SSDs behave when free space is reduced.
I just bought a 500 GB external SSD I want to use as a boot drive, so I'm really interested to find out at what point I might run into problems because of lack of free space. That drive will only have 60GB of free space. RAM on the Mac this will be used with is 16MB.
 
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As your late 2009 Mini has a speed of 3Gb/ps that is as fast as it will go so no poin t spending more on a 6Gb/ps drive.
 
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Also begs the question why SSDs slow down so dramatically and what causes that.
See post #3
@krs, I didn't address that because the poster did not cite any reference for what had been "heard" somewhere. I've never heard about SSDs slowing down dramatically. They work, work well, until they fail, usually catastrophically. Backups are more important for SSDs because they give no warning of pending failure.

The idea on leaving space on drives has a couple of components: 1) The drives themselves want empty space to avoid fragmentation. That factor is much more critical on spinners than SSDs, as I said. The rotational latency and head traverse times make a badly fragmented drive really slow. 2) The operating system needs some space on the drive for scratch space, cache and swap space. Again, on a spinner, you want to avoid fragmentation on those three because of the rotational/traverse latencies. On an SSD, again, it's not so critical, but what you want to avoid is needing space for swap and not having it. So how much to leave depends on how much memory you have and what you are doing. I've read that for the typical user about 5% is plenty, but I suspect a larger drive could be less, maybe a little as 3% on a 2TB SSD. Right now, on my MBP, the swap is shown as 277.8 MB. That probably came from yesterday, when I launched Parallels and Win10 to look at a question someone asked about it.

What will happen if you keep an SSD really full, is that the number of writes to the drive will go up quickly, and with not much room for wear-levelling, the drive will wear out faster than it would if less full. I don't have a practical number for what is optimum, I'm not sure the research is really strong enough to make an absolute call on that. I haven't seen Randy's comments so I won't address them. It could be he has the research.

Personally, no matter the numbers of what CAN be done, I leave a lot of room on all my drives, spinners and SSDs. I have 11 external drives, plus the internal on the Mac, none of which are much over 2/3 full. Rather than pack a drive, I'll go get another one.
 
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As your late 2009 Mini has a speed of 3Gb/ps that is as fast as it will go so no poin t spending more on a 6Gb/ps drive.


The last time I was looking for an SSD with a maximum 3Gb/ps speed, the selection was very poor and many of the 6Gb/ps speed drives that confirmed backward compatibility for 3Gb/ps speed were often cheaper and of newer better design.

Anyway, something to be aware of as you say.





- Patrick
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However, there was a bit of a discussion about free space required on drives and Randy seemed to have quite a different opinion - it was basically keep 20% or better free on either SSD or spinner.



Do I dare ask if Randy is getting "ancient" like some of the information in the article you referred to that Jake noticed and picked up on??? :D

But his info does seems to be fairly up-to-date, even for an old Mac Guru and Lawyer. :Smirk:




- Patrick
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Patrick -
If you read 10 articles on the net (hopefully recent ones) about the amount of free space on spinner hard drives and SSDs you will get 11 opinions.
Maybe by doing more research one might come across valid controlled test s, but I haven't up till now.
The only practical experience I ever had when macOS brought up the hard drive space low message at which point the free space I had was in the MB range on an 80GB dive.
That was years ago and I managed to recover fine at that time by just deleting a bunch of files. I never shut down the Mac and tried to reboot with that little free space.
I typically tried to leave at least 20% free space, but leaving 100GB free on a 500GB drive for instance seems overkill especially when I read (and I wish I could find that article again to check the date) that the 20% guideline came about initially to allow Windows to be able to defragment the drive successfully.

For spinner drives the theory is a bit simpler since there are not that many different ways the data can be stored on the media, when I read about SSD technology, there are many more methods that I want to get my head around.
And I'm just talking about ways of storing data, not the data manipulation to maximize life.

Although, I suppose in the end it doesn't much matter if one has a solid backup strategy.

@Jake - Thanks for your detailed explanation.
 
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Hello,

Thank you all for your replies, I finally got an HP pro 1500 from a friend of mine.
I hope it will work good.
 
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Hello,

Thank you all for your replies, I finally got an HP pro 1500 from a friend of mine.
I hope it will work good.


I'm glad you seem to be happy with the printer you got, but I don't know what it has to do with the thread topic: Best SSD for Macbook Pro Mid 2010

Not exactly related!!! :Smirk:





- Patrick
======I
 
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I'm glad you seem to be happy with the printer you got, but I don't know what it has to do with the thread topic: Best SSD for Macbook Pro Mid 2010

Not exactly related!!! :Smirk:





- Patrick
======I

Hahaha my bad, actually this is an SSD and I wanted to say Intel not an HP.

Intel® SSD Pro 1500 Series (180GB, 2.5in SATA 6Gb/s).
 
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Hahaha my bad, actually this is an SSD and I wanted to say Intel not an HP.

Intel® SSD Pro 1500 Series (180GB, 2.5in SATA 6Gb/s).


Yeah that's quite a different beast, and I must say they don't print anything worth a ****!!! :D





- Patrick
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Hahaha my bad, actually this is an SSD and I wanted to say Intel not an HP.

Intel® SSD Pro 1500 Series (180GB, 2.5in SATA 6Gb/s).

well at least we have got somewhere now give it a go see how it works out for you I have a Mac mini from 2009 with a Samsung 250gb ssd in there its a SATA 6Gbps drive but its happy running at SATA 3Gbps

let us know how you get on,
 

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