Upgrade 3,1 Macbook Pro (non unibody) with 6GB RAM and SSD

[DeeEss]

Hi all.

Wondering if upgrading my old 2007 Macbook Pro 2.4 Core 2 Duo with an OWC SSD and 6GB RAM will be worthwhile.

Has anyone here done this and can comment on the performance increase?

On paper it sounds reasonable, although 6gb of RAM is still very little, but real world performance is often different. Especially since the ram is only 667MHz.

Anyone have any real world experience doing this?

Thanks,

 

[bugout]

I did the 6GB upgrade on my when I had your model. You'll see a significant performance boost because of the SSD.

 

[DustinT]

Whether or not this upgrade really benefits you will depend on your workload. Perhaps you can share with us what your normal usage is and we might be able to help you decide if this upgrade will bring the value you are looking for.

 

[h00ligan]

Exact same machine and exact same thought.. I may slide a storage drive into an optibay..

Sorry to piggyback but I'm working on photoshop/lightroom and general usage. It seems like maybe I can eek some more life out of this machine for now.

 

[DeeEss]

Thanks for the answers.

My main machine is a 6 core MP with 24GB of RAM. SSD and Raid. But I need to do some work out of the country and it's too expensive to ship the MP and hiring where I am going is not really possible.

The problem is it's retouching very large photoshop files 4GB and up at least.

So even 8GB of RAM wouldn't really be enough. But i just wonder if it's even worth going there with the older machine which has such limited RAM and only at 667MHz. I have an eSata Express Card with an SSD for a scratch which will help somewhat.

I may have to buy another computer but I'm trying to avoid it as at this stage apart from this job it won't be a hugely necessary item to have. Even at 8GB of RAM for the new machines it's going to be limiting anyway.

Think I'm just going to get the 6GB of RAM and deal with sluggishness.

 

[DeeEss]

Exact same machine and exact same thought.. I may slide a storage drive into an optibay..

Sorry to piggyback but I'm working on photoshop/lightroom and general usage. It seems like maybe I can eek some more life out of this machine for now.

I agree, I just wanna squeeze every last drop out of it as it's not my my main machine. The thing is so beat up, dented, crushed and scratched (the right hand side, bottom case has been flattened!) but it just keeps motoring on.

Work horse is defo the word!

 

[Capt Underpants]

One thing to note is that your MBP uses an SATA 1.5 connection, so your SSD will be limited to 150 MB/s read and write.

That said, I upgraded my Macbook with a Crucial M225 a while ago, and the speed increase was still worth it. Still contemplating the 6 GB RAM upgrade, though.

 

[DeeEss]

One thing to note is that your MBP uses an SATA 1.5 connection, so your SSD will be limited to 150 MB/s read and write.

That said, I upgraded my Macbook with a Crucial M225 a while ago, and the speed increase was still worth it. Still contemplating the 6 GB RAM upgrade, though.

Ah damn it. I forget this.

Thanks for the reminder.

 

[DeeEss]

ha ha. I just ran Geekbench on this old computer it got a score of 3211.

Sate of the art.

 

[shreddy]

I have an early '08 (last of the non-unibodies) 2.5Ghz which I upgraded with an Intel X25-M a while ago. Best upgrade ever! It really made an enormous difference. I don't manipulate enormous files in memory, the closest I get is running several Parallels VMs simultaneously which swallows lots of memory anyway.

If you're going to be low on memory anyway, the SSD will also help as stuff swapped out to disk will get read/written so much faster than a mechanical drive...

 

[DeeEss]

Yes the SSD seems on paper like a good way forward and I can always use it elsewhere later so it's win win.

I'm just waiting on the eSata Express card to be delivered to test things out with my G-Raid Mini but being limited with Sata 1.5 regardless of internal or external is a big bottleneck. So the extra 30mbs or so might not really make that much of a big difference.

I've just tested saving a file via FW800 to RAID 0 and a 13GB PSB file takes about 30 mins. It's a long time. And it seems to take about 10 minutes for it to recover and stabilize. Working on the file was very sluggish but doable.

I might just deal with the sluggishness and get on with it. I don't really want to spend anything on this machine when I'm going to get a new MBP in 6 months or so. THis one will be put out to pasture as an itunes juke box.

decisions decisions.

 

[h00ligan]

well the other factory (maybe less for you and your machine with the face a mother could love ) is that these machines are still worth something on ebay etc. The simple fact is that even after I had the mainboard replaced I feel it's a time bomb with the graphics glitch..

so sinking another 500 or so into this machine is half of a new 13 or 1/4 a 15. In some ways I look at it and say.. alright - you've done your duty... let's move on. Otoh.. maybe I can get by another year and take $400 of that with me to the next machine (ssd etc)

I really keep swaying. I had made the decision to go with the 13" 2.7 but mine arrived dented. The benchmarks for Photoshop show it as an equal to the high end 15.. based on cs5 thread usage.. but I'm not sure.

I wish I could open the 13 I have sitting here and run with it for a day, but I ordered from MacMall and based on what I've recently read, i'm lucky they even accepted the return to begin with, I don't want to push it by actually turning it on.

The other point is the base 13 or 15 with ssd and maxed ram will likely be much more of an improvement and has thunderbolt for external storage...

 

[DeeEss]

well the other factory (maybe less for you and your machine with the face a mother could love ) is that these machines are still worth something on ebay etc. The simple fact is that even after I had the mainboard replaced I feel it's a time bomb with the graphics glitch..

so sinking another 500 or so into this machine is half of a new 13 or 1/4 a 15. In some ways I look at it and say.. alright - you've done your duty... let's move on. Otoh.. maybe I can get by another year and take $400 of that with me to the next machine (ssd etc)

I really keep swaying. I had made the decision to go with the 13" 2.7 but mine arrived dented. The benchmarks for Photoshop show it as an equal to the high end 15.. based on cs5 thread usage.. but I'm not sure.

I wish I could open the 13 I have sitting here and run with it for a day, but I ordered from MacMall and based on what I've recently read, i'm lucky they even accepted the return to begin with, I don't want to push it by actually turning it on.

The other point is the base 13 or 15 with ssd and maxed ram will likely be much more of an improvement and has thunderbolt for external storage...

Yeah my thoughts exactly. I'm not going to bother with it for the sake of a couple weeks putting up with a slow old computer. I've already had the logic board replaced on this one twice, it's pointless sinking more into it to squeeze it out a bit longer. - Move on.

 

[coocooforcocoap]

I know this is a rather older thread, but has anyone done this upgrade and did it help?What model mem was used, what SSD? I am thinking of upgrading from 4gb to 6gb, and taking out the superdrive and replacing with an SSD for the boot drive. My end game is to make this machine fast enough to teach MS Project 2010 class, using VMWare. Currently the internal drive is 75% full, and once I start VMWare and begin working in MS Project, things are getting too slow. I was even thinking that a bootcamp partition on the SSD might be a better idea. I just need to get the performance up to teach this class, without investing in another MBP. Cheers!

 

[snaky69]

I know this is a rather older thread, but has anyone done this upgrade and did it help?What model mem was used, what SSD? I am thinking of upgrading from 4gb to 6gb, and taking out the superdrive and replacing with an SSD for the boot drive. My end game is to make this machine fast enough to teach MS Project 2010 class, using VMWare. Currently the internal drive is 75% full, and once I start VMWare and begin working in MS Project, things are getting too slow. I was even thinking that a bootcamp partition on the SSD might be a better idea. I just need to get the performance up to teach this class, without investing in another MBP. Cheers!

AFAIK you will not be able to replace the optical drive with a hard drive or SSD easily, the connector in the optical bay isn't SATA, I believe it is PATA. Maybe someone can chime in on an adapter and tell us whether or not it works. There are also no caddies made for the machine that I'm aware of, so you'd have to either have your SSD bumping around in there or make your own.

 

[coocooforcocoap]

AFAIK you will not be able to replace the optical drive with a hard drive or SSD easily, the connector in the optical bay isn't SATA, I believe it is PATA. Maybe someone can chime in on an adapter and tell us whether or not it works. There are also no caddies made for the machine that I'm aware of, so you'd have to either have your SSD bumping around in there or make your own.

Hi there, it's been a month or so, but I am pretty sure there is a caddy for this machine and that the connection is sata ? I do remember replacing the harddrive once, and seem to remember the ribbon cable from both drives was coming off the same connector. But I've messed with so many of these, I'm Alzheimeric over this. But thx so much for the reply!

My big question is any of this will make a VM of Windows 7 run fast enough to be productive running Lion.

 

[snaky69]

Hi there, it's been a month or so, but I am pretty sure there is a caddy for this machine and that the connection is sata ? I do remember replacing the harddrive once, and seem to remember the ribbon cable from both drives was coming off the same connector. But I've messed with so many of these, I'm Alzheimeric over this. But thx so much for the reply!

My big question is any of this will make a VM of Windows 7 run fast enough to be productive running Lion.

More RAM will benefit the VM more than a faster hard drive(or SSD), but both upgrades would be worthwhile.

 

[h00ligan]

I skipped the SSD and put a momentus xt in. It helped quite a bit with boot and app launch times. I wouldn't put more than that into a 4 yo machine after my experience with lack of SSD reliability and given that those machines only support sata 1.5

 

[coocooforcocoap]

I skipped the SSD and put a momentus xt in. It helped quite a bit with boot and app launch times. I wouldn't put more than that into a 4 yo machine after my experience with lack of SSD reliability and given that those machines only support sata 3

Hi there h00ligan, i was thinking along those lines as well...lots cheaper and more storage. so it works well eh? Do you have VMWare or PD by any chance. I was wondering about load times for those...it takes forever for VMWare to loadup Win7...minutes before it's usable. cheers

 

[snaky69]

Hi there h00ligan, i was thinking along those lines as well...lots cheaper and more storage. so it works well eh? Do you have VMWare or PD by any chance. I was wondering about load times for those...it takes forever for VMWare to loadup Win7...minutes before it's usable. cheers

If you're using VMWare on your bootcamp partition, it'll be much slower than true virtual machine. That might be why.

 

[h00ligan]

I don't. Actually my machine is going up for sale. Sorry!

 

[coocooforcocoap]

If you're using VMWare on your bootcamp partition, it'll be much slower than true virtual machine. That might be why.

No, I don't use bootcamp, I'm using Lion which has sped everything up but VMWare, it's now slower opening .vmwarevm files, if that can be imagined. the only dog app my mbp. so hence my thinking more ram, faster drive.

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I don't. Actually my machine is going up for sale. Sorry!

yes, i guess it's about that time to offload these 3,1s. almost 4 years now, a lot to ask from one model...