Anyone with SSD in 2007/2008 MBP (or similar) still happy with overall performance?

[tibi08]

Check out my Benchmarks.

The whole point in Geekbench is that it measures the hardware, independent of the OS. That's why it's available on Windows and Mac on the same scoring basis. I'm no expert but I don't feel this is informative.

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I have a question for the original poster and others who have done this. You stated that you upgraded to ML with your 2008 MBP. Ever since I installed Lion on mine it has been significantly slower. I have read other threads which stated that the OS upgrade to ML seemed to increase performance in one way or another. Was that your experience (wanting to upgrade HDD aside)?.

On my 2007 MBP, I found it ran better with ML compared to Lion. I would recommend it.

 

[sofianito]

The whole point in Geekbench is that it measures the hardware, independent of the OS. That's why it's available on Windows and Mac on the same scoring basis. I'm no expert but I don't feel this is informative.

You are right in the sense that GeekBench is written in C++ and the core benchmark algorithms uses probably the standard library which is cross-platform that's why it is available on several plateforms and OSs. For UI, it probably uses too a cross-plateform GUI Toolkit such as wxWidget.

However, the Operating System is a layer that sits between Applications and Hardware layer, and I believe the quality of the compiler and OS might have an impact on the results. It would be interesting to run GeekBench on a Windows Bootcamp and compare...

On my 2007 MBP, I found it ran better with ML compared to Lion.

I felt it faster too on ML, although I'll probably go back to Snow Leopard which I think is faster than both...

 

[Ubele]

Bottom line: I think you should get an SSD (128GB) if you want to love your computer again and make the wait for the next rMBP a little less painful.

Thanks. At the very least, it will speed up boot time.

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So at the moment you don't have an SSD in your macbook? Once you put an SSD in there, it will be blazing fast for the applications you run.

Correct. I have a 7,200 rpm 320 GB HDD, which replaced the stock 5,400 rpm 200 GB HDD. At the time, it provided a good speed boost.

 

[Ubele]

Another note: The latest firmware update for you macbook (assuming it is the unibody from 2008) - apparently ups the allowable ram to 8gb from 6gb. I haven't tried it yet, but read it on here somewhere.

No, it's a pre-unibody Santa Rosa from early 2008, so 6 GB is the max. Officially, it's 4 GB, but it soon became known that 6 GB works.

Not to hijack this thread - but in response to your question of whether it be worth it to upgrade - I went through 2 retina MBP's - both with screen gradients, which for my tastes didn't justify the money. I returned them. I have a 2008 MBP - the first unibody, with 4gb of ram and I've got an intel 320 ssd, which actually made it feel remarkably similar (obviously this is a subjective measure from very light work - the rMBP is so much faster in other ways that the comparison is not very valuable) - so I've decided to wait to upgrade. I can live with it for now. I was planning on making the rMBP my primary photo editing machine - but it just couldn't calibrate correctly.

Incidentally, I'm writing this on a friend's rMBP - which for some reason has a virtually perfect display... and it's almost enough to change my mind. Time will tell I guess. I will say that the new mountain lion upgrade has made a large difference in what I remember my copies of the rMBP feeling like with a light workload.

Yeah, I try to avoid rev A products, no matter how cool, because they seem more prone to issues. At Best Buy the other day, I met a guy who works for LaCie, testing their drives with various computers. He loves the rMBP they have, but he advised me to wait for rev B, because the unit they have is "quirky." On the other hand, he said that the MacBook Airs are very stable, as are the iMacs, although he advised waiting for the Ivy Bridge iMac, if I want an iMac. Every time I go to a store that sells Apple products, the rMBP is what I gravitate toward, although an 11" MacBook Air and a 27" Thunderbolt display would be a great combination. The rMBP of course has a better graphics card, but I've been reading that the Haswell 5000 (?), which presumably will be in the 2013 Airs, will be twice as fast as the current 4000, which might be good enough for my needs. I'm not a gamer, but I use Aperture a lot. We'll see if I make it until next year before I upgrade.

 

[CausticPuppy]

I just installed (today) a 128GB Crucial M4 in my early 2009 macbook. 2.66GHz Core2Duo with 8GB memory.

It feels like a new computer- due to both the SSD and the fresh install of Mountain Lion. I could easily get another year out of this until a Haswell macbook air is available.

 

[Ubele]

So the ultimate question - do you pay £300-400 (UK) for a 250Gb SSD for an old MBP, or splash out £1,800 on a rMBP. I chose the latter option and I'm happy with my choice. It will last me another 4-5 years, whereas the 2007 MBP with SSD upgrade would not. You are just buying yourself a little more time before bringing your old MBP into retirement.

As others have stated, SSDs are now less expensive than that, but I fully understand your main point, and it's the reason I've been hesitating doing the upgrade: how much money do I want to put into a computer that I will almost certainly replace next year? I've always been someone who uses a computer until it's unusable. I had a 2000 Powermac G4 Sawtooth that I kept for 8 years, upgrading every component that could be upgraded. I don't know whether that was any more or less expensive than replacing computers on a more-frequent basis and selling the old ones while they still had high resale value.

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If you look around, you can usually find the Crucial M4 256GB for around $200, and the 128GB is $104 at Amazon. I have the 256GB in my 2011 MBP,and hubby will be installing one into his late 2008 MBP this weekend. It's been great so far...no problems at all.

The question on whether or not it's worth it to upgrade depends on you and how the machine is working for you now. Are you maxing out the CPU with the tasks you're currently doing? If the CPU is the bottleneck for you now, then an SSD isn't going to help. But if it's your hard drive slowing things down, the SSD will make a world of difference.

I need to look into whether my HDD or CPU is the primary bottleneck. My first inkling of slowness was that my 6,000-photo Aperture library took a long time to load and scroll through, as do Word and PowerPoint files. Boot-up takes a while, too, and I know that an SSD would help with that.

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That is true as well, and it simply means that you need to prioritize. I thought long and hard about getting a rMBP. I looked at one in store and liked it a lot. If money was no object I'd order one upon announcement. But I know I would not be happy with a base model, and the way Apple price out the upgrade options, I'd have to plunk down about $4000 to get one with max storage. With my limited time on this planet in mind, at this point I'd rather go have a vacation with that money. I keep my laptop at home for those occasions anyway

I came to the same conclusion. With a 256 GB SSD, I'd have to move some of my files to another drive, which would be a slight inconvenience. A 512 GB SSD would be more than enough, but a $500 premium (in the rMBP) is pretty steep. Next year, it should be cheaper.

 

[Ubele]

I assume you have the Santa Rosa model. I have the maxed spec model (17" matte, 2.6Ghz, 160GB HDD, 4GB RAM) and I loved it. I remember I upgraded the disk 3 years ago with a 320GB WD 7200 HDD. It used to run fantastically with Leopard, but unfortunately it died last year, and the 3 years AC warranty expired a year ago . According to the symptoms, the issue is probably related to the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. I read some people could resurrect it by cleaning the cpu+gpu, baking it into the oven, and finally greasing the cpu+gpu . I might try it though...

My motherboard went out earlier this year, to the extent that my MBP wouldn't boot. According to what I've read, a faulty NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT could have fried the motherboard. Since I couldn't prove it, the repair wasn't free; it was a flat $320 under AppleCare, which expired two weeks later.

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I have a question for the original poster and others who have done this. You stated that you upgraded to ML with your 2008 MBP. Ever since I installed Lion on mine it has been significantly slower. I have read other threads which stated that the OS upgrade to ML seemed to increase performance in one way or another. Was that your experience (wanting to upgrade HDD aside)?

Thanks.

I only installed Mountain Lion a week ago, so I don't yet know whether it feels faster than Lion did. I don't recall my MBP feeling slower after installing Lion, but that could be because I hadn't yet started doing things that made it feel slower. I scanned and processed nearly 1,000 photos, upgrading from iPhoto to Aperture early in the project, and that was when the spinning beach balls started getting to me. It's possible that I then became hypersensitive to every action that didn't occur immediately.

 

[NightCastle]

Thanks for all the replies and benchmark info and I hope your endeavor works out for you OP.