Just refurbed my 3 year old Macbook with an SSD and double the RAM. I’m assuming most of the difference in speed is coming from the SSD (as the RAM will only make a difference when would have filled the old 4GB) but the change in start up and app and document opening is amazing.

Booting into Windows and using tracklogs can now scroll and resize maps with almost no delay.

Price of SSD drives is really low now – really good investment

It really does seem to be the SSD that’s made the difference. User switching had become incredibly slow but is still instant now even running a terminal command to max out the memory and force use of swap.

I know I’m late to this party but still very impressive.

what’s the longevity like on them now? have considered one in the past, but having killed memory sticks through use, it just made me think that they have a way to go yet.

Which SSD did you go for?

I’ve got a 2011 MacBook Pro and its feeling a little aged now, would rather a £300 upgrade over a new MacBook Pro at the moment.

Just went to Crucial’s site and let it do it’s business – 240gb is £100 inc VAT, 480 less than twice that.

Used superduper to clone the existing drive using a usb caddy for the SSD, booted from it via USB to check it worked before installing. Biggest pain of the process was having to go to the Apple store to get one of the tiny screws removed after I’d rounded it off. Do yourself a favour and buy a decent phillips screwdriver of the right size first and don’t try to manage with a crappy old ‘glasses repair kit’

You also need a little Torx driver to swap the lugs on the old drive onto the new one.

£300 upgrade

Good news. It’ll be less than that.

I used a Vertex 4 in mine and it made a huge difference. I’ve just taken out the optical bay and fitted the 500GB drive in it that came with it and it now boots slightly slower and makes a bit more noise (being seriously fussy).
Will probably put the opt back in it as I don’t need the capacity yet. I was going to set it up as a fusion drive but as I understand it, it won’t use the HDD part until it needs to (and it won’t for another 70GBs)

Does anyone have any real world comparison of that Crucial drive (i’m assuming the M500?) against something like the 840 Pro?

I nearly pulled the trigger on the crucial one, but it seems to come out bottom of all the SSD tests I can find.

Will the difference between a fast SSD and a slow one really be that noticeable to the average user?

My 2011 Samsung Series 9 ultra book with an SSD has been faultless. Still fast, light too!

Running 2 samsung 120gb 830’s for over a year ,no problem. Don’t think anyone would notice the difference between top ssd’s, go for it! Earlier 60GB OCZ failed after a year but plenty of development since they first came to market.

I have the 240gb crucial m500, and if I remember right it’s read speeds are comparable with the samsungs but write speed is a bit slower, seen as most of the stuff I put on it will only need to be written once I doubt I notice any difference!

I went from a macbook pro with 8 gig of memory/non ssd to a macbook air also with 8gig but with an SSD.

What is noticeable:
– everything loads faster
– coming back from sleep is instant
– battery life is amazing (okay now i have an air but even so 10-12 hours no problem)
– Doesn’t get as hot.

I’d not go back to spiny hard drives now.

Will the difference between a fast SSD and a slow one really be that noticeable to the average user?

Depends what you do. I bought the fastest I could find for my MBP for processing photos, but a more basic Crucial one for my work laptop as I don’t so such disk intensive stuff at work.

So, a week or so in now.

Performance is great but battery seems to be running down more than previously when in sleep/hibernate (or whatever the mac goes into when the lid is shut). Any idea why (or am I imagining it) – I’d have thought the drive was completely asleep even if the rest of the machine wasn’t

An SSD uses bugger all power, so it won’t be draining the battery.

I’ve just today upgraded my 2009 Macbook with a 1Tb hybrid drive as I wanted the memory and 1TB SSD’s are still very pricy – around £400. It has a 1TB conventional 5400rpm HDD and an 8GB SSD module with logic that prioritises your most common tasks to the SS portion of the memory. Boot up speed has reduced from about 1.5 minutes to about 25 seconds so well chuffed. The Drive cost £70 for a Seagate drive vs. about £400 for a 1TB SSD. Not quite as quick as an SSD but works very well so far!

An SSD uses bugger all power, so it won’t be draining the battery.

That’s what I thought. Get noticably hot in use though – seemingly hotter than the spinning disc – though shouldn’t be doing anything when asleep.

Will it need a cooling fan?

Del – Member

what’s the longevity like on them now? have considered one in the past, but having killed memory sticks through use, it just made me think that they have a way to go yet.

Very good now. There is a forum I stumbled on a while back where the users are running constant reads and writes to their SSDs to see how long it takes for them to go pop. Most have gone massively over their rated lifetime. Unfortunately can’t remember the name of the site 🙁

Upgraded my late 2010 MBP last night.

Put M500 240gb SSD in the HDD slot
Put HDD into a £6.95 optical drive caddy I got from ebay and stuck that in the optical bay
Time Machine restore on to the SSD
Format the HDD

Job done! 🙂

I played around with it this morning and the difference is staggering. Feels like a completely different machine.

Total cost of upgrade was £90.

i’d never heard of an ssd until i posted on here a week or so back about how to set up a new pc (partitioning) and someone said to use on as the boot disc.

long and short, under 50quid for a sandisk ultra and fitting kit, managed with a bit of google magic to install it myself, and its given me an amazing pc.

what’s the longevity like on them now?

Depends what you do with it. According to AnandTech my Samsung 840 should be good for at least 35 years, but so far the raw wear levelling count is going up by about 1 every 6 weeks and apparently you need to get worried at 1000 which implies about 108 years use left. This is rather more than I’ve ever got out of a mechanical hard disk.

This is rather more than I’ve ever got out of a mechanical hard disk.

I’m happy with all my Seagate Barracuda IV HDDs which are all into double figures of age. These SSDs sound like witchcraft!

Similar story here – M500 240GB replaced the 170GB hard drive in my 5 year old Vaio last night. 5 minute job. Clean install of Windows 7. Reinstalled the applications I actually need (so no bloatware).

Wowsers… seriously quick. Boots from cold to connected to internet in about 30 seconds, and that includes me typing in my password. Very impressed.

Been looking at the crucial 500 as an upgrade but don’t know much about SSD Are they a lot quicker than a 7200rpm hard drive?

SSD is probably the easiest and best bang for buck upgrade you can do to a puter.

@kuco – yes they’re a lot faster than a 7200 between 2.5 and 5 times. I have a 750gb 7200rpm HDD and very happy with it, it was £60 and I would have needed a 500gb SSD which was £225 last June. I ran a blackmagic (free app download) test and my drive came out at 110 – if you try the same you can compare your 5400. The SSD seem to come out at 250-500 but that depends on the internal hardware in your mac. My boot time is around 70 seconds on a 2009 mac mini with the HDD.

EDIT: if those of you who’ve done the SSD upgrade don’t mind I’d be keen to see blackmagic test results, pretty please !

Just downloaded and tried that Blackmagic. Comes out about 60MB/s for read and write.

AFAIK they are technically not quicker in a straight line, so to speak, when reading large continuous blocks of data, but that hardly ever happens in real life unless you are editing movies or something.

They are of course much faster in normal use because they don’t have to physical move a head around the place to find the data.

@kuco I would have guessed about that or a bit better, solid guess a 7200 HDD would be nearly twice as fast and an SSD four or five times (at least). My understanding is that if you’re a bit memory constrained the SSD will help a lot too as swapping in/out to disk will be much faster.

Yes but RAM is both cheaper and more effective at reducing swap speed than an SSD so do that too.

@molgrips I would say with mavericks that even with 4gb ram an SSD would be first choice for upgrade money for most normal users ? I’d definitely think with 8gb ram I’d go for SSD before 16gb

I’ve got an 8gb memory upgrade on the way also sounds like the SSD would be a worth while investment. Be happy to spend the money if it’s going to give this donkey a couple more years life.

Yep and you can take it with you when you upgrade too.

What’s the best price/speed tradeoff these days, I might be tempted to look for a 256Gb one. It’s for a work laptop, but I do have to use it 8 hours/day for everything so I do sometimes spend my own cash on it.

4 or 5 times faster? More like 10 and that’s for continuous transfer which matters less.

Random read performance is of the order of 5-8000 times better depending on what drives you compare.

256gb 840 evo or pro is the current sweet spot.

Bigger SSDs are faster as well as bigger, more chips to access in parallel.

@IA I believe it depends on your sata spec – older machines can’t run an SSD as fast, that’s why I was curious to see blackmagic numbers from those that had done the upgrade. I’ve see 500 on a new machine with Evo SSD but also 250 on older machines with same drive. @molgrips I would agree that Evo 256 seems to be current “best” based on MacRumors threads.

Right, but you’re still talking about a benchmark with a sequential transfer component.

Regardless of sata spec, with an SSD you’re not waiting 15ms for a disk to spin round to get your data.

As we’re on a bike forum, a relevant analogy:

A light bike will maybe make you a bit faster up a long climb, but the real difference is the nicer handling and sprightliness in all singletrack.

Even if you’re slow (sata3gbps) and so the time saved on the long climb isn’t as much, you still enjoy the nicer feeling and handling in the singletrack.

jambalaya is spot on, the top level figures (i.e. the ones on the box) for my SSD on my 2010 MBP are throttled by the fact it’s SATA II rather than SATA III (i think those are the correct numbers).

I get about 250-260mb/s read and write. However, I was getting 34mb/s with the HDD, so it’s running like it’s been smoking crack. It’s honestly like having a new laptop, can’t recommend it enough.

@ia and @peter, understood and thanks for real data. Have plan to upgrade gf’s rMBP to 8gb ram and 256gb SSD, I don’t really need the Mini so fast and it’s the media storage device so the 750gb is useful although only half full currently and as a 2009 machine I didn’t want/couldn’t afford to buy a 500gb SSD

what’s the longevity like on them now? have considered one in the past, but having killed memory sticks through use, it just made me think that they have a way to go yet.

Crucial M4 has been in my 08 MacBook for ~four years now, no signs of imminent death yet.

An SSD uses bugger all power, so it won’t be draining the battery.

This is noticeable; got about an hour more on battery after switching IIRC.

if those of you who’ve done the SSD upgrade don’t mind I’d be keen to see blackmagic test results, pretty please !

I don’t have any benchmarks from my MacBook SSD, but I do for my MacMini.

It’s a late 2012 server edition (2.6 i7, 16GB RAM) running two SSDS configured on RAID0 (This is soft on the Mac Mini, IIRC). Blackmagic test below. I guess you can effectively half these number for a single unit.