I’m thinking of changing the hard drive in Mrs T’s 2009 macbook pro. The standard one is small and she uses an external hd so was thinking of removing the standard hd and fitting a 120gb SSD in its place and then removing the (never used) optical drive and fitting a 1tb sata drive in its place. id probably put the optical drive in an enclosure so she can still burn stuff.

What are the thoughts and recommendations on this? We’ve maxed out the ram already and she uses it mostly for photo editing. We can’t afford to change the whole thing or it would be going and an iMac would be its replacement.

Ta.

Edit, oh and a good place to buy them? Used ebuyer in the past and they were ok.

I have a crucial M4 in my Macbook pro and a new Samsung SSD in my works laptop and the Samsung seems to perform much better. Ii think it’s the 840 series.

Amazon is as cheap as anywhere to purchase.

Cheers. I always overlook Amazon for this type of thing. I’ll have a look.

You can certainly do what you suggest. Do you need the boot speed of an SSD ? I put at Western Digital Black 750hdd in my 2009 Mac Mini and it runs really nicely (it replaced original 160gb drive). It spins at 7200 rpm vs 5400 of older drives. It cost about £60. Switching user hard drive used for booting and OS is a little more complex than ram switch over but it sounds like you know what you are doing. Backup and fresh OS install vs clone etc. Have a look at excellent MacRumors forums, online tutorials from OWS and ifixit. I bought my kit from an online seller in France as I needed it posted there but any of the larger online sellers will be fine. If you don’t have an external drive enclosure get one as you can put the original HDD into it and boot from it externally and use it as your time machine backup, I assume you now about the various startup modes and holding down cmd-R etc.

Edit: just on SSD and to follow up on post above the Samsung 840 pro/Evo drives get lots of positive feedback on MacRumors

By the way iMac are great and powerful but you may also want to consider a MacMini if you switch, you can use a normal pc type monitor (23 inch are £100, 27 £300) plus apple keyboard and mouse and get a flexible upgradable machine for half price of an iMac. There are lots of rumours about a mini update in 2014 and if it’s upgraded as doscussed with latest processor amd graphics (as fou d in mac bookmpros and imacs) you’ll get a really great machine which will last you many years.

I’ve never done this sort of thing before but am reasonably practical and have read up about what and how to do it and it seems pretty straight forward so long as i’m are careful and take my time.
i liked the idea of fast boot up and was thinking that we can use the sad for all the programs and files that are used a lot and store everything on the other drive for storage of stuff that isn’t used much. a bit like she is doing at the mite but without having to carry the extra drive but with the advantage of 2 drives.

The Samsung or Crucial software will clone your conventional drive to the SSD for you via a USB to SATA converter and then you simply swap them around.

Make sure you have things like encryption keys and software license keys handy as sometimes it will recognise it’s a new volume and request them again.

Cool thanks.

If you’re replacing the optical drive with an HDD (i’ve done this) then you need an data doubler or similar:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/drive_bracket/datadoubler/

(I have one of these).

Bit fiddly to fit, but straightforward. I had to reseat mine as I was feeling a little vibration from the HDD but reseating it/checking all screws were tight sorted it.

Boot times? People still boot computers, like an animal? 😉

Half the reason to get a mac IMO is just sleep/resuming 99% of the time. And who cares about boot times even if you do? It’s the everyday performance boost that an SSD is good for. All those little pauses, gone.

For a particular SSD recommendation, 840 pro.

As above I sleep my Mini generally but even a boot is fast with the HDD, I suppose after 20 odd years of Microsoft any startup in less than a minute feels fast to me. If you want SSD I suggest you go with 256, I fear 128 is a bit tight storage wise. Have fun with the upgrade I was quite pleased with myself when it all worked (had a bit of fiddling and had to do disk format / clone twice but it’s been running perfectly for 8 months now)

If you’re replacing the optical drive with an HDD (i’ve done this) then you need an data doubler or similar:

$35 from the US????

Definitely go with “or similar” 😉

£6.95

Ah I got mine when they were pretty new, and OWC were the only option to get something to fit my mac.

Why go to the faff of having two seperate drives? I’ve just put a 1TB Hybrid drive in my 2009 Macbook and its like a new machine. Boot up time has dropped from about 1.5 minuts or so to about 20 – 25 seconds – not quite as quick as a pure SSD, but not far off. You can then get rid of the optical drive and bank the weight saving.

OP you can download the free app “blackmagic speed test” – my HDD gives read/write of about 110. I’m guessing your HDD will be about 80. The Samsung evo’s should run close to 500 – EDIT: just checked on your 2009 MBP you should get about 250 as you have older Sata standard/connectors – so the SSD will be twice as fast as my HDD, worth it ?

You should read this forum – it speaks of doing firmware upgrades before installing the SSD – its along thread from 2011 so start at the end/near the end http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1177020

I have been reading a lot about older mac upgrades. One thing I came across was a tip to locate the OS and home folder on one drive, with everything else on a different drive. It was said that you’re negating lots of the benefits of having a faster drive by performing r/w operations on the same drive very often.

Not sure how valid it is, but something I’ll be looking at when I get an SSD in the Mac pro. I have access to 16GB SSD drives for peanuts, so just investigating whether that would be big enough to get a Lion install on with Home folder, then all the apps and data would live on a different drive.

One thing to note if you add a new large faster HDD watch out for the noise, I got a WD 500GB Black to upgrade from the standard 250GB and the noise was unbearable turned the silent MacBook Pro into a noisy standard laptop.

I soon ditched it and went back to the 250GB drive and about to hit the button on a 480GB SSD.

@RichPenny – I think that’s nonsense you’ve been reading. The reason people split drives is to put the OS onto an SSD and data elsewhere. If large SSDs where cheaper they’d put the lot on one drive

@poonprice – my WD Black 750gb drive is silent, just like the old 160gb original drive it replaced.

Rich penny I’d read that too which is one reason why I was thinking 2 drives. If I had the cash I go for a large ssd and be done but they are still out of budget for the size id need.
Part if the point if this is to remove the need to have an external hard drive for storage.

From what I read you could cope with a tiny SSD, which is why I was hoping the 16gb would do. I think the point was that if your apps and the OS were on the same drive then you’d not be seeing the full benefit of the SSD.

Maverics OS takes up about 5.5GB of drive space, but might need more once up and running and by the time the drive is formatted and partitioned. There is another thing with Macs to consider – apparently they don’t do well if you use over 75% of the drive capacity, apparently they seem to like to have about 25% of the drive left free, so you might get away with 16GB SSD just to run the OS, but it won’t leave you with much growth capacity. I’m not sure where it would save apps or if you can designate which drive you could save your apps to and run them from, so you could easily and very quickly clutter up your 16GB SSD ‘OS Drive’.

It took me leass than 10 minutes to put a 500Gb SSD in my wife’s MacBook Pro.
It’s transformed her laptop, she had 250Gb HDD in there before.

I fitted a 1GB Seagate SSHD hybrid drive to my Lenovo laptop over the weekend and it was painless.

I bought it from DABS along with a Startech SATA to USB3 enclosure. I downloaded the free Seagate Disk Wizard (cut down version of Acronis) and managed to get my old 320GB drive cloned and the new drive installed in less than three hours.

The new drive is quiet and seems noticeably faster. Total cost was £85.

I am sure it would work with a Mac if you can get some free MAC software to clone the old drive.

@wobbliscott my McMini used to run ok at 90% disk full and that was with just 2gb ram !

Got a hybrid drive in my MBP. It sped things up a bit, but the flash memory is used to cache reads, but writes go to disk. This limits the type of work that will get a speed boost.