SSD Upgrade for my MacBook Pro

[tpenfield]

After a couple years flirting with low disk space and declining performance, I am upgrading my 7 year old MacBook Pro to a solid state drive. The original hard drive is a 250 GB hard drive of 2009 vintage. The new one is a 480 GB SSD.

So far, so good . . . I got the OWC upgrade kit from MacSales and Carbon Copy Cloner, which I have used in the past to upgrade my previous MacBook. The original drive has about 220 GB used . . . So over 90% used. The new drive will be at about 50% capacity when the cloning is done. Not sure if I will be any reduction in used space resulting from the copying. Maybe a little as a 7 year old drive probably has some 'dead' space. We shall see.

In addition to having more, space, I am looking forward to a performance boost that can perhaps extend the life of this machine a few more years. I priced a replacement MBP and it would be pushing $2k. So, that will take some mental conditioning prior to making that purchase.

The cloning has been running for about 30 minutes and it is about 15 GB done of the 220 GB. So, probably gonna take 7-8 hours to clone the drive. Then I got to put the new drive in the laptop. Not sure I will actually use the old drive for anything. :noidea:

 

[tpenfield]

All set . . . I think/hope.

The files from the old HDD laid down on the new SSD using 198 GB +/- vs. the 220GB. so, some improvement there. The swap-out was straight forward and I am up and running on the 'new' computer

Here are the old (left) and new (right) drives.



Here are the guts of the MacBook Pro 13 (mid-2009 model)


Here is the computer with the new SSD up and running - 198 GB used. It was at 195 GB after the copy, and it looks like it carved out another 3 GB during boot up (probably swap space), although I max'ed out the RAM in this thing several years ago to 8 GB.


Hopefully, this will get me down the road a couple more years and I can then get a new MBP , as I think the CPU is this will probably not run the next version of OSX . . . but maybe it will :noidea:

 

[southkogs]

I just got a new MBP, but let my son take a whack at putting a new SSD in the old one to keep it going. I was surprised at how "easy" it was to install. We did the swap over pretty quick and got the book going rather fast.

Speed difference is pretty nice.

The Admiral is actually still running my very first MacBook Pro / I think it was a 2006 model. We've kept it back in the Mountain Lion OS, but my iMac (2009) is actually running El Capitan right now. Will be interesting to see if it'll take the next OS.

 

[bruceb58]

My MacBookAir has a SSD and I put one in my Windows desktop. I wish my work would spring for one. No more computers that I will own will will ever have anything but an SSD for the boot up drive from now on.

 

[Volphin]

I love OWC. Great folks and reasonable prices. FWIW, I don't use those over bloated OSX releases. I'm screaming fast with Lion.

 

[NYBo]

I replaced the HDD in my 7-year-old Toshiba notebook with a 480GB SSD, and, wow, what a difference! I then took the plunge and upgraded to Windows 10 (from Windows 7), which added even more speed. Like bruceb58, an SSD boot drive is a must-have from now on.