Early 2011 MBP: advice on speeding things up until I can get more RAM, etc.

[yjchua95]

1) I was referring to a comment above that said the Samsung 840 used relatively cheap flash, so I wanted to stay within a budget but not get the cheapo stuff. Are there noticeable, real-world performance differences when you go up a level in cost? And what the best metric to comparison shop is.

Cheap NAND is TLC NAND, which is used in the Samsung 840 (non-Pro) and all Samsung Evo series.

More durable and better-performing NAND is MLC NAND, which is commonly found in consumer SSDs (and even professional SSDs). For instance, the budget Crucial BX100 uses MLC NAND, and the pro-grade SM951 PCIe SSD uses MLC NAND as well.

The performance difference now lies largely in the controller. A Crucial BX100 is pretty cheap and fast, and there's probably no point paying for a Samsung 850 Pro that may only give about 15% better performance in real world scenarios, at an exorbitant price.

 

[Dark Void]

1) I was referring to a comment above that said the Samsung 840 used relatively cheap flash, so I wanted to stay within a budget but not get the cheapo stuff. Are there noticeable, real-world performance differences when you go up a level in cost? And what the best metric to comparison shop is.

I'll add that we don't do really any gaming (though I would love to get back into Sim City...but anyway), but my girlfriend does do photo editing on this computer for a side professional business. Until I can finish saving up for building a power desktop, this is the best machine we have.

2) On this, I was more curious how I could know/trust the current HDD if I wanted to transfer it to the other bay and use it for data. Obviously, I don't want to put important data on it if it's gonna fail, but except for the Disk Utility, what battery of tests can I run? Seems silly to get rid of electronics (and adding to the disturbing piles of discarded electronics) based only on a hunch.

[Note: so I did run Disk Utility, than the Recovery partition disk utility to repair the disk, but I still get beachballs and apps like Spotify take about 5 minutes to load if they do so at all]

This is precisely the advice I was trying to give - don't overthink it. Just grab a reputable SSD (Crucial, Samsung) and be on your way. You'll be very pleased.

 

[OrangeInc]

This is precisely the advice I was trying to give - don't overthink it. Just grab a reputable SSD (Crucial, Samsung) and be on your way. You'll be very pleased.

So forget all this TRIM stuff, TLC NAND, MLC NAND and just go to Best Buy and throw one in there? I've done regular HDD swaps in the cMBP before I'm expecting it's the same process. If the finite writes are gonna last for about 10 years then I'm ready to buy one as soon as I can. Going from 30mb/s read/write to 300mb/s read/write sounds like a dream machine.

 

[Dark Void]

So forget all this TRIM stuff, TLC NAND, MLC NAND and just go to Best Buy and throw one in there? I've done regular HDD swaps in the cMBP before I'm expecting it's the same process. If the finite writes are gonna last for about 10 years then I'm ready to buy one as soon as I can. Going from 30mb/s read/write to 300mb/s read/write sounds like a dream machine.

I would pay attention to TRIM, but that isn't really something you could overthink. You just enable it. I'm not suggesting it is useless to pay attention to these things - but, and especially if you're new to SSDs, any reputable consumer grade SSD will be great for you.

When I bought my first SSD years ago, I really didn't pay attention to too much. Got a Crucial, installed it, got TRIM Enabler and was on my way. You don't even need to go download any sort of enabler application now in 10.10.4, just enable it via Terminal.

In just about every case as long as the drive is SATA 2.5'' it will work and adapt as it needs to. The only thing I would stress is finding a brand that won't let you down on speeds - Crucial drives have solid real world read/write speeds from my experience. I'd recommend them.