Posted: 10/27/2014 2:42:51 AM EDT
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I have a "Late 2008" Unibody MacBook (purchased mid 2009), and I'm looking to put an SSD into it (240GB and up) to replace the 160 GB spinner, which hopefully will give me some extra speed and let me squeeze out a few more years. I've already maxed out the RAM, so no need to suggest that.
My question is, do I go with one of the top name manufacturers (Samsung, Intel, Crucial) and hope the damned thing works/fits, or do I go with outfits like Other World Computing, who seem to sell SSDs made by people I've never heard of, but supposedly are guaranteed to work? |
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Disclaimer: I do not own or use Macs.
An internet search tells me that your late 2008 unibody MacBook is SATA (instead of SATA2 or SATA3) and will accept any SSD without issue. It will be somewhat bottlenecked since SATA is slower than SATA2 or SATA3, but it will work and will be faster and better than your current mechanical HD. I'd go for a SSD from a manufacturer with a reputation for quality and a warranty to match. That means Intel or Samsung. |
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Thanks for the info. Would this be a good one to get? Best Buy is running a special on this one:
Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB MZ-7TE250BW Or, should I be looking for the PRO? Or does none of this matter since my computer is SATA I? |
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Quoted:
Thanks for the info. Would this be a good one to get? Best Buy is running a special on this one: Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB MZ-7TE250BW Or, should I be looking for the PRO? Or does none of this matter since my computer is SATA I? Even the cheapo SSDs are going to saturate SATA1's bandwidth, so speed will not materially increase from one SSD to another. The difference between the EVO and the PRO in the real world will be the warranty. The Pro is 5 years vs. the EVO at 3 years. If warranty is the top concern, the Samsung 850 Pro even has a 10 year warranty. To be honest, I'd go with the Evo for your application. The 3-year warranty is long enough, especially for a laptop from 2008. Any product can die, but Samsung is top notch. Protip: Black Friday is a month away. Dollars to donuts, you can get an 840 Evo (or better) for less. I'd wait. Also, make sure 250GB is big enough for you. I have a 120GB SSD in my laptop and it's perfect for me, but some people store a lot on their laptops. SSDs do not work well when they are nearly full. If you're going to be using the majority of the capacity of a 250GB drive, maybe up the budget to $200 and see what BF brings for 500GB drives. |
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Quoted:
Thanks for the info. Would this be a good one to get? Best Buy is running a special on this one: Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB MZ-7TE250BW Or, should I be looking for the PRO? Or does none of this matter since my computer is SATA I? That's the one I put into my 2009 MacBook Pro 13" Works great. Be sure to d/l the firmware updater from Samsung and make sure that it is at the latest. |
| I am looking at the 500gb samsung 840 EVO for my macbook pro (2010) I'm a bit confused about what exactly I have to do in order to do an HDD replacement (I have a bootcamp partition, parallels, windows partition on this drive) Time machine, I think, will do fine imaging the mac side but it won't do anything with the windows side of things. |
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If you're going to be using the majority of the capacity of a 250GB drive, maybe up the budget to $200 and see what BF brings for 500GB drives. What's the "max" utilization rate I should try to stay under for SSDs? I'm at about 120 of 160GB on the spinner. Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile |
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Quoted:
What's the "max" utilization rate I should try to stay under for SSDs? I'm at about 120 of 160GB on the spinner. Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile Quoted:
Quoted:
If you're going to be using the majority of the capacity of a 250GB drive, maybe up the budget to $200 and see what BF brings for 500GB drives. What's the "max" utilization rate I should try to stay under for SSDs? I'm at about 120 of 160GB on the spinner. Posted Via AR15.Com Mobile The guides I've read say < 75%. |
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Quoted:
I have a "Late 2008" Unibody MacBook (purchased mid 2009), and I'm looking to put an SSD into it (240GB and up) to replace the 160 GB spinner, which hopefully will give me some extra speed and let me squeeze out a few more years. I've already maxed out the RAM, so no need to suggest that. My question is, do I go with one of the top name manufacturers (Samsung, Intel, Crucial) and hope the damned thing works/fits, or do I go with outfits like Other World Computing, who seem to sell SSDs made by people I've never heard of, but supposedly are guaranteed to work? Crucial M500 works good in mine. I've read that SSD's with Marvell chipsets seem to play better with Macs. |
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I had a ~2009 MacBook Pro that I installed a 500Gb Kingston SSDNow V in.
It was awesome, worked great. I replaced the 2009 with a 2011 MBPro and the Kingston went in that as well. I filled up the 500GB and replaced it with a 1TB Samsung EVO SSD and it has worked great as well. No issues or complaints with either model. For the current crop of SSD's I wouldn't hesitate to recommend or install another Samsung EVO. Great drive and it has "just worked". |
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Quoted:
I am looking at the 500gb samsung 840 EVO for my macbook pro (2010) I'm a bit confused about what exactly I have to do in order to do an HDD replacement (I have a bootcamp partition, parallels, windows partition on this drive) Time machine, I think, will do fine imaging the mac side but it won't do anything with the windows side of things. I think you could use a disk cloner in this case. However, I would suggest clean installs. In other words, backup OS X to TM, and windows to a flash drive or your favorite backup method, then install new drive, install fresh OS X, import with TM, then install boot camp and copy over all necessary windows data. |
| Im heading in that direction. Debating if a bootcamp partition is even necessary with parallels. Might be a good idea so you at least have the option of running something in native windows. With parallels you could have all windows applications reside only on the virtual machine. I dont know if time machine backs up the virtual machine or not, it won't pick up a physical partition. |
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Quoted:
Thanks for the info. Would this be a good one to get? Best Buy is running a special on this one: Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB MZ-7TE250BW Or, should I be looking for the PRO? Or does none of this matter since my computer is SATA I? You can't apply the 840 EVO Stale Data fix to Macs. The fix only works on NTFS partitions. The 850s use a different way of doing flash and don't have the Stale Data problem. |
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Quoted:
You can't apply the 840 EVO Stale Data fix to Macs. The fix only works on NTFS partitions. The 850s use a different way of doing flash and don't have the Stale Data problem. Quoted:
Quoted:
Thanks for the info. Would this be a good one to get? Best Buy is running a special on this one: Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB MZ-7TE250BW Or, should I be looking for the PRO? Or does none of this matter since my computer is SATA I? You can't apply the 840 EVO Stale Data fix to Macs. The fix only works on NTFS partitions. The 850s use a different way of doing flash and don't have the Stale Data problem. Yikes, would I need to get a different make/model then? |
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I installed the 500gb 840 evo tonight. Seems to be up and running just fine - even though I made a couple mistakes. The mac os transfer was simple, I bought a usb/sata external enclosure, used disk utility to create the partition and used carbon copy to migrate everything. Then I booted up on the clone drive still in the external enclosure just to check, it booted fine. Then I took the mac apart, swapped disks, and booted into the ssd. Everything seems good.
Moving bootcamp, windows, and parallels was a little more complicated but I think I have it. I still have to deal with licensing issues with some software as the configuration has changed. I elected to stay with a physical bootcamp partition. Its not clear to me that autocad will run smoothly on a vm, so I want the ability to run in native windows until I am more confident. It reboots so fast with an ssd it's not nearly as painful as before. Samsung has published the firmware update and slo data fix .iso files for the mac now. I haven't run them yet. Folks are having issues with the update because not all macbooks have optical drives and making a bootable usb drive seems to be an issue. I made a bootable cdrw disk with the fdos and iso files on it, I think. I downloaded the fix, burned it to cdrw, the burn worked, but after the burn the verification test said it failed. The files are there, don't have a clue if the disk works. samsung updates |
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http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147248&Tpk=N82E16820147248
840 EVO 250GB for $114.99, today only. Great price if you want it RFN and don't want to wait for BF/CM. |
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Just a note on the samsung fix-em-up routines. I re-created a boot disk following samsung instructions and attempted to boot the machine up off of the cd-r. I got the grey screen of death - and nothing else. Could not even eject the disk. I had to pull the optical drive out of the machine to get the disk out.
perhaps the usb method would be better if you can figure out how to make a bootable thumb drive. So for now, i have not run the firmware upgrade and I have not run the performance restore. From what I've read you don't need to run the performance restore until you actual see a degradation in performance. SUCCESS!!! The image from samsung has to be a .dmg extension, not .iso. I followed this procedure and it worked!! 840 EVO firmware upgrade / performance restore on mac |
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Quoted:
Just a note on the samsung fix-em-up routines. I re-created a boot disk following samsung instructions and attempted to boot the machine up off of the cd-r. I got the grey screen of death - and nothing else. Could not even eject the disk. I had to pull the optical drive out of the machine to get the disk out. perhaps the usb method would be better if you can figure out how to make a bootable thumb drive. So for now, i have not run the firmware upgrade and I have not run the performance restore. From what I've read you don't need to run the performance restore until you actual see a degradation in performance. SUCCESS!!! The image from samsung has to be a .dmg extension, not .iso. I followed this procedure and it worked!! 840 EVO firmware upgrade / performance restore on mac 
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Quoted: Thanks for the info. Would this be a good one to get? Best Buy is running a special on this one: Samsung 840 EVO 250 GB MZ-7TE250BW Or, should I be looking for the PRO? Or does none of this matter since my computer is SATA I? Great minds... I just ordered the same SSD (in a kit with mounting hardware) from Amazon based on a recommendation from a consultant that I've been working with for several years. The guy's advice on hardware has never been wrong. I bought it to add to my aged Windows Server 2003 machine. Its present configuration has four HDDs on a Promise array. I've been running VMs on a RAID 0 partition, which is OK for small things but really bogs down on the work I'm doing - Linux VMs running PostgreSQL 8.4 and 9.1. I have some major projects coming up soon. My consultant friend told me the speed with which SSDs can do random reads and writes makes them ideal for the task. He told me that when he upgraded from HDD to SDD a compile job he was working on went from five minutes down to about 10 seconds. I've been running some benchmarks using complex queries. I'll post performance gains on Friday if all goes according to plan. I'm considering adding a SATA III controller but can't recall what kind of slot(s) I have open. I think I have a PCI-Express available. Will verify when I install the SSD. |
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OK, a Samsung 840 EVO is installed on my Windows box. Initial quick performance test results: I run a complex SQL query with about 30 JOINs and several sub-queries against a PostgreSQL database of about 4 GB. The result set is about 10,000 rows. When the host VM resides on my old RAID 0 partition (four 7,200 RPM Seagate SATA drives on a SATA II controller), the query takes about 335 seconds to run initially, then goes down to about 10 seconds because of caching in RAM. On the SSD the first time the query is run it takes about 10.7 seconds, then about 3.4 on subsequent executions. I like.  Next step = Add a SATA III controller card. |
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Quoted:
OK, a Samsung 840 EVO is installed on my Windows box. Initial quick performance test results: I run a complex SQL query with about 30 JOINs and several sub-queries against a PostgreSQL database of about 4 GB. The result set is about 10,000 rows. When the host VM resides on my old RAID 0 partition (four 7,200 RPM Seagate SATA drives on a SATA II controller), the query takes about 335 seconds to run initially, then goes down to about 10 seconds because of caching in RAM. On the SSD the first time the query is run it takes about 10.7 seconds, then about 3.4 on subsequent executions. I like.
Next step = Add a SATA III controller card. I'd slap in a new MB before I'd buy a $100 SATA III card. |
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Quoted: I'd slap in a new MB before I'd buy a $100 SATA III card. Quoted: Quoted: Next step = Add a SATA III controller card. I'd slap in a new MB before I'd buy a $100 SATA III card. After reading some reviews on NewEgg I might just skip it. Maybe it's time to call my consultant friend again. My machine has been running strong since September 2007. It's on its third power supply. |
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Looking forward to Mall-Ninja's AAR. I did some research and determined that my MB (with an Intel P35 chipset) doesn't support PCI-e 2.0, so it would be pointless to put a SATA 6 GB/sec. controller in the machine. It just won't go that fast. The only reason to add another SATA controller would be to add more drives. I still have one connector available on the Intel controller. Maybe I'll use that to add a 1 TB SSD and migrate everything from my spinning drives to that. A little more info on throughput for the Samsung SSD, somewhat hobbled by being on a SATA II controller in my machine. These figures are from the Samsung Magician utility supplied with the drive: Sequential Read 248 MB/s (of 540 maximum possible) Sequential Write 269 MB/s (of 520 maximum possible) Random Read 52,377 IOPS (of 97,000 possible) Random Write 18,685 IOPS (of 66,000 possible) The sequential tests are only slightly faster than my RAID 0 partition with 4 x 7,200 RPM drives. The SATA II controller seems to be the bottleneck. The Random Read performance is the main reason I bought an SSD for database work on VMs, and I am very pleased with the result. Pro-Tip: Unless your OS supports TRIM functionality for SSDs, don't set up Windows drives as Dynamic Disk - Leave them as Basic so that Samsung Magician can handle TRIM. I'm on Windows 2003 Server R2 which does not support TRIM. One of these days I'll need to modernize. |
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Partial AAR:
I say "Partial" because we're still on the shakedown cruise. Didn't have time for progress pics, since I had to shoehorn this in during the kids' nap and sleep times. I combined the migration to the SSD along with the upgrade to OS X Yosemite. So, this took a few extra steps. First, I downloaded the Yosemite Installer. Then, following online instructions, I made a bootable USB thumb drive (after having to move all the crap off of one I borrowed from the wife. After that, I ran my system through Time Machine for a full backup. The hardware swap was incredibly easy. A philips head + a torx head screwdriver and the thing's swapped in. The old 160GB spinner went into a USB 3.0 enclosure. Installed OS X Yosemite on the new SSD (Clean Install), which went pretty quick. Once it completed installation, it restarted, and then OS X asked me whether I wanted to transfer data from an old mac, etc. I hooked up the old spinner drive in the enclosure, and opted to transfer over user information and documents, but not the applications (I had some shit I installed but couldn't quite get rid of on the old installation). Once I went through and installed the desired applications (so far just MS Office 2011 - plan to dig out old copies of iLife to snag iDVD and iMovie), I'm 90% there. All that's left are the firmware updates and performance restore software. Observations: - The SSD is much faster. I notice it when opening applications, and on startup/shutdown. It used to take about 2 minutes for startup. Now it's 30 seconds. - The update to OS X Yosemite nuked Box Sync (I use Box.net, not Dropbox), which basically ties me to USB thumb drives instead of a quick connection to a cloud drive. Looks like it's time to explore the full capabilities of my WD MyCloud. |
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Partial AAR: Observations: - The SSD is much faster. I notice it when opening applications, and on startup/shutdown. It used to take about 2 minutes for startup. Now it's 30 seconds. - The update to OS X Yosemite nuked Box Sync (I use Box.net, not Dropbox), which basically ties me to USB thumb drives instead of a quick connection to a cloud drive. Looks like it's time to explore the full capabilities of my WD MyCloud. Look into Trim Enabler, too. Make sure to read the Yosemite-specific instructions. |
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Look into Trim Enabler, too. Make sure to read the Yosemite-specific instructions. Quoted:
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Look into Trim Enabler, too. Make sure to read the Yosemite-specific instructions. Ah, shit... I didn't even consider that... So, its either take your chances with degrading performance, or security hole. How much of a performance degrade will I actually see? If I could manually address this, is there an app for that? 
Apple's looking more and more like a gilded cage. |
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Quoted: Ah, shit... I didn't even consider that... So, its either take your chances with degrading performance, or security hole. How much of a performance degrade will I actually see? If I could manually address this, is there an app for that? Apple's looking more and more like a gilded cage. Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: Look into Trim Enabler, too. Make sure to read the Yosemite-specific instructions. Ah, shit... I didn't even consider that... So, its either take your chances with degrading performance, or security hole. How much of a performance degrade will I actually see? If I could manually address this, is there an app for that? Apple's looking more and more like a gilded cage. |
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Ah, shit... I didn't even consider that... So, its either take your chances with degrading performance, or security hole. How much of a performance degrade will I actually see? If I could manually address this, is there an app for that?
Apple's looking more and more like a gilded cage. Quoted:
Quoted:
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Look into Trim Enabler, too. Make sure to read the Yosemite-specific instructions. Ah, shit... I didn't even consider that... So, its either take your chances with degrading performance, or security hole. How much of a performance degrade will I actually see? If I could manually address this, is there an app for that?
Apple's looking more and more like a gilded cage. Another option might be to run something like this every so often. Not sure if/how much it might shorten lifespan, though. |
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Need for trim is highly exagerated and overated, IMO.
I ran an Intel SSD on an old XP computer for a year and a half, without trim. It was still nice and speedy up until I retired the laptop, and the SMART details said that I hadn't even gone through1% of the rated write cycles of the drive. |