Thinking about jazzing up my late 2008 MacBook 5,1 Al unibody

[L19L91L]

Turns out mine had some defective cabling with the hard drive or something and my motherboard was replaced. They repaired it for me and replaced the really messed up casing too. Was pretty impressed. I too feel really good about it. I'll be putting in my ssd as soon as it arrives in the mail. I'm a new mac user but this thing still performs rather well and these upgrades are pretty sweet.

Thanks for the help all.

 

[bruds23]

Happy Mac User

Hi guys, I am considering putting a SSD and more ram in my unibody 2008 Macbook 2.4ghz 4g RAM

So, I am well behind the curve here but it looks like you can upgrade this machine to 8gigs ram so I think I am going to do that first of all.
I'm running ML and it looks like my EFI is upgraded.

For $80 I can get two sticks of these which seems like a no-brainer.


And then I was going to get one of those OWC Data Doublers and putting the old drive in it and in place of the old HD drive bay putting a 128G Samsung Electronics 840 Pro Series 2.5-Inch 128 SATA_6_0_gb Solid State Drive MZ-7PD128BW in there.

I would do this because I have read that the macbooks sometimes don't like booting from one of those optical drive disks and that the max speed would be 3gb sec not 6. So why not put the SSD in the regular drive bay, boot from it and then put the old HD in the data doubler for storage.

Total cost = $250.
Not bad, no?

I don't really want to break the bank on this, especially since i am planning on getting a new MBA at the end of the summer but it would be nice to get a few more years out of my Macbook.

What do you guys think?

to you ,i am a happy Mac user ,i have a 2008 Later MacBook ,with 2.,0Gb,updated to 8Gb of Ram ,it run fast,its great,i had someone tell me 8Gb of Ram won't work , i did some research ,on that ,find that it was a bunch of bull scrape,the trick was to get a match set of 2x4Gb ,an as for Hd Drive ,i used a SSD Drive 120Gb,i also build a RAID storage of 1.0 Tb drive,use my Mac Mini as a server,Both have Mountain Lion on them ,Mac Mini has 12Gb on it ,my computers run super fast,i use that RAID to Download too for my MacBook,if you need Help,let me know,with yours

 

[seveej]

I have the same MacBook. How does the extra 4 gigs of RAM affect performance?

Edit: Well, I guess that since you upgraded your storage at the same time, it might be difficult to tell what any performance improvements were due to.

I had this very machine (once upon a time) and I did a number of upgrades and reported on them in the Mac Pro Photoshop benchmark thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=8953494#post8953494


But here some more details (upgrades done in this order and starting from a factory setup):
Jump from default 5400 rpm to double-sized 7200 rpm:
Pros:
+ more space
+ Application (PS, others) specific performance increase: none to moderate
Cons:
- more noise and noticeable vibration
- more heat

Jump from 2 GB to 4 GB RAM
Pros:
+ slightly snappier
+ better multitasking performance
+ Application (PS, Aperture) specific performance increase: immense
Cons:
- none

Jump from 500 GB 7200rpm HDD to Intel X25-M G2 SSD (80 GB)
Pros:
+ Whoa! It felt so snappy it was hard to believe it was still the same machine.
+ Application (PS, Aperture) specific performance increase: faster application loading. Otherwise no performance increase.
+ Silence (blissful sigh), battery performance increased by 30-45 mins.
Cons:
- Where shall I put all my stuff?

Jump from 4 GB to 8 GB RAM
Pros:
+ multitasking performance better, but barely noticeable (may be more relevant without snappy SSD paging) and only under high strain. (YMMV)
Cons:
- none (price)

NOTE: All these results were with 10.5

So,
If you already have 4 GB of ram, you should have a look at activity monitor to ascertain whether 4 GB suffices or 8 GB would give a boost.
In my opinion, a SSD makes a world of difference in all usage types except when you are using the machine as a number-cruncher (running seti@home, handbrake or something like that). The general responsiveness improves like you won't believe.

RGDS,

 

[altuixde]

Thanks for the info seveej! Activity Monitor shows that I'm sometimes using a lot of swap, but I don't usually notice any slowdowns due to that (likely because of my SSD). However, more RAM would probably prolong the life of my SSD, because there would be less wear due to swapping. Also, more RAM would be useful when I use QRecall, but other than that it probably wouldn't make much of a difference for me. I think I'll upgrade to 8GB of RAM if the price of the RAM goes down. I'm not sure if it will, though.

 

[Montymitch]

I'll chime in, I have the 2.4 variety and I have 8gbs installed and an intel 120gb ssd. I've been using it like this for about 2 or 3 years now--it's awesome. Like a previous poster said, it's faster than a new machine with a regular hdd. Granted, compared to my iMac, Aperture bogs a bit and movies take forever to render.
I bought the laptop almost 5 years ago; I think I got my money's worth.