Early 2011 MBP 17in - Stable SSD option?

[tigerx82]

I would like to buy a 240 - 256GB SSD drive for my 17in Early 2011 MBP.

After reading the SSD buying guide on the Macbook Pro forums, it looks like there are specific drives that work best based on specific models, i.e. SATA 2,3,6 etc. I do not really care about maximizing performance as I expect they would all perform much better than my HDD and the performance differences would be more subtle.

After initially settling on getting the Crucial M4 256 SATA III drive, reviews on sites like newegg mention incompatibility issues with the Early 2011 17in MBP.

Any thoughts or guidance on SSD drives from 240GB to 256GB that are confirmed to work with the 17in MBP from Early 2011?

Many thanks!

 

[r0k]

I would like to buy a 240 - 256GB SSD drive for my 17in Early 2011 MBP.

After reading the SSD buying guide on the Macbook Pro forums, it looks like there are specific drives that work best based on specific models, i.e. SATA 2,3,6 etc. I do not really care about maximizing performance as I expect they would all perform much better than my HDD and the performance differences would be more subtle.

After initially settling on getting the Crucial M4 256 SATA III drive, reviews on sites like newegg mention incompatibility issues with the Early 2011 17in MBP.

Any thoughts or guidance on SSD drives from 240GB to 256GB that are confirmed to work with the 17in MBP from Early 2011?

Many thanks!

On a newer MBP you definitely want the newer 6GB/s drives but you are right that if you settle for the 3GB/s drive you can save money. I use 3GB/s Vertex 2 drives in my Mac minis and they work fine. Be careful. All SSD drives are not created equally. Carefully read the reviews before you pick what might seem like a bargain only to find it slowing down after a year.

 

[tigerx82]

it worked

In case this is useful to anyone else. I went ahead and got the
C4 256GB SSD from crucial (CT256M4SSD2) and it does indeed work on my early 2011 17in Macbook Pro.

Thanks

 

[mrjake2]

I've now tried putting two different Crucial M4 512Gb drives in my early 2011 MBP. The short version: 1st drive with older firmware locked up, 2nd drive with newer firmware works great.

The first one used the older firmware (revision 2 I think) and was a pain to install. When I finally got all of my data onto it, the first time I booted from that drive I got the spinning beach ball and then the computer wouldn't recognize the disk. I think those are unrelated, though; many people reported the spinning beach ball, but I'm pretty sure the drive crash was due to defective hardware.

Luckily I bought it through Amazon, and I was able to return it for a free replacement. The second one came with revision 9 firmware pre-installed, and that was supposed to fix the spinning beach ball issue. I've only installed the new drive recently, but so far it's performing like a champ with no beach balls of doom.