SSD for early 2008 17" MBPro

[ricede]

Can anyone tell me if is it possible to put a 500 GB Samsung 850 into an early 2008 17" MBPro 2.5 Ghz Core2Duo ?

Is there maybe a better SSD for this mac ? Or will any SSD be incompatible with this link speed ?

Intel ICH8-M AHCI:
Link Speed: 1.5 Gigabit.
Negotiated Link Speed:1.5 Gigabit

Any advise most welcome. Thanks

 

[snaky69]

Can anyone tell me if is it possible to put a 500 GB Samsung 850 into an early 2008 17" MBPro 2.5 Ghz Core2Duo ?

Is there maybe a better SSD for this mac ? Or will any SSD be incompatible with this link speed ?

Intel ICH8-M AHCI:
Link Speed: 1.5 Gigabit.
Negotiated Link Speed:1.5 Gigabit

Any advise most welcome. Thanks

Yes it is possible to use a SSD. I don't see why you'd think it isn't. A hard drive's a hard drive.

SATA is backward compatible with itself. Any SSD you buy will set itself to whatever the board can handle.

 

[MultiFinder17]

Any SATA SSD you get today will work just fine with your MacBook Pro, although as it only has a SATA I bus, realize that you won't be getting the full performance out of the drive. It will still be a ton faster than any spinning hard disk that you can put in it though! I threw an SSD in my mid-2007 MacBook Pro, and it was still night and day. Good luck with your upgrade, and enjoy your MacBook Pro a bit longer!

 

[ricede]

Thanks for the answers. I only posted because a friend fitted an Intel SSD into the same year of MBP & had strange things happening. Maybe it was a duff SSD. I don't want to shell out on a fairly expensive SSD & then have compatibility problems. You have put my mind at rest. Thanks

 

[CoastalOR]

Thanks for the answers. I only posted because a friend fitted an Intel SSD into the same year of MBP & had strange things happening. Maybe it was a duff SSD. I don't want to shell out on a fairly expensive SSD & then have compatibility problems. You have put my mind at rest. Thanks

Crucial has an excellent reputation also. You should be able to get the Crucial BX100 for a little cheaper than the Samsung. Crucial is $15 cheaper on Amazon.

 

[ricede]

I just checked here in India, on Amazon, and the Crucial BX100 is $15 more expensive. So i think i will go with the Samsung.

 

[austinpike]

I only posted because a friend fitted an Intel SSD into the same year of MBP & had strange things happening.

A number of people do seem to have issues with older MacBooks, the diagnosis is generally a bad internal SATA cable. I was upgrading a friend's 2008-ish macbook and tried 2 or 3 different SSDs - all of which would either not be recognized or fail partway through OS installation. Yet the original hard drive and a new hard drive I ended up using both worked fine. (and the SSDs work fine in other machines.) I never tried a new cable as he was fine just using the new HD.

It seems odd to me that a bad SATA cable could allow an SSD to "partially" work; meanwhile a standard hard drive is fine. But maybe somehow the SSD exposes the flaw as it is pushing more data.

Anyway I wouldn't let that dissuade you, but I would have a source for a replacement cable lined up.

 

[wallaby]

Do you have an ExpressCard slot on your laptop? That was the easiest SSD upgrade for me. Just popped one in (48GB was enough for my system and apps) so that I could leave my 320GB HDD alone. I opened up this machine once, and I'm not really interested in doing so again.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Any SATA SSD you get today will work just fine with your MacBook Pro, although as it only has a SATA I bus, realize that you won't be getting the full performance out of the drive. It will still be a ton faster than any spinning hard disk that you can put in it though! I threw an SSD in my mid-2007 MacBook Pro, and it was still night and day. Good luck with your upgrade, and enjoy your MacBook Pro a bit longer!

Same here. I'm using a SanDisk SSD.