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Ssd

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m117

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 10, 2011
5
0
Hello all,

I will preface this by saying i read through this: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1177020/

I am looking to buy an SSD for my early 2011 macbook pro 13" for general use. According to the above thread, since it ist a pre-2011, there isn't an obviously better choice for SSDs.

What i am wondering is the following:
1. What size (120GB 320GB 512GB etc...) should i get?
1.1) should the amount of GB in the SSD match the GB in the original hard drive, or is a smaller SSD equal to a larger normal Hard drive?
2. Which company makes the best one?
3. is professional installation necessary, and if not, how difficult is instillation?

thanks you in advance =)

--m117
 
m117 said:
Hello all,

I will preface this by saying i read through this: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1177020/

I am looking to buy an SSD for my early 2011 macbook pro 13" for general use. According to the above thread, since it ist a pre-2011, there isn't an obviously better choice for SSDs.

What i am wondering is the following:
1. What size (120GB 320GB 512GB etc...) should i get?
1.1) should the amount of GB in the SSD match the GB in the original hard drive, or is a smaller SSD equal to a larger normal Hard drive?
2. Which company makes the best one?
3. is professional installation necessary, and if not, how difficult is instillation?

thanks you in advance =)

--m117
Click to expand...

1) SSD's cost more than there weight in gold. If you can afford it (or need a large capacity) get the largest you can afford. Size matters on how much you use. Also you could use an ssd as a boot drive and app drive and an optibay for storage
2) Intel
3) it is not nesecairry. apple even post instructions. It is pretty easy
 
wrinkster22 said:
1) SSD's cost more than there weight in gold. If you can afford it (or need a large capacity) get the largest you can afford. Size matters on how much you use. Also you could use an ssd as a boot drive and app drive and an optibay for storage
2) Intel
3) it is not nesecairry. apple even post instructions. It is pretty easy
Click to expand...

thanks a ton!

i dont have a ton of disposable income (id like to no more than $600 if possible), so that will be a limiting factor.

i use my mac for all my school needs, as well as some gaming (TF2 and Minecraft :p), so do i need a ~300GB, or could I use a ~120-200GB.
 
Intel makes good reliable drives, but so does Samsung. Checkout the Samsung 830, it's one of the newest, fastest drives.

Hard for anyone of us to say what your storage demands are. Doesn't sound like you'll need to go beyond 250GB.

Drives to look at:

1) Samsung 830
2) Crucial M4 (same controller as Intel)
3) Intel 510
 
Thank you al so much. i think i will go for a 250GB samsung or Crucial m4. thanks a ton
 
ahdickter said:
But without TRIM support, could the lack of aggressive garbage collection cause problems over time? (I'm not trying to insult you, just wondering since I've been looking to buy one.)
Click to expand...

No offense taken. There is no evidence it will cause a problem. Forum members have been using these drives of all different brands and I have not seen reports of slow downs due to lack of TRIM. The first gen. Intel X-25 SSDs seemed to slow down over time, but the gen. 2 X-25 had better firmware and did not have this problem.

Remember, even if there were no garbage collection at all in firmware the worst that can happen is WRITE speeds only can slow after every single cell on the SSD has been written to. Even if that did happen all you would need to do to get back to like new performance is enable the TRIM hack and boot into single user mode (in Lion) and run the command "fsck -ffy" to TRIM all free space on the drive.

In short, don't lose sleep over this. People are not having trouble with it.
 
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