SSD & MacBook Question

I have a 2010 MacBook (2.4ghz Core 2 Duo, 4gb Ram 250gb HDD) and am going to attempt updates before I call it quits and just buy a newer MacBook.

My question is this...It's older technology so does it really matter what SSD I get? There are slower, less expensive SSD's out there, for example: http://www.amazon.com …itle_3&smid=ATV​PDKIKX0DER

My thought is that it doesn't matter which SSD I get, because I will be limited by the hardware speed of the laptop, is that right?

I just read that my specific model of MacBook (7,1) was tested by OWC and accepts 16gb of RAM, so I'm putting in the 16gb of Ram and an SSD to see if that makes a big difference..

An SSD is the best upgrade you can do. You may need TRIM Enabler. But the latest Yosemite now finally supports it via the command line.

SSD's speed bottlenecks are the SSD controller and the motherboard's SATA bus speed. But no matter what controller it is attached to, the SSD will be a noticeable performance upgrade over platter seek/read.

Most of the responsiveness you notice will be due to drastically lower random access times...not so much max sustained r/w unless you move huge files frequently.
Lower end ssds like mushkin chronos/reactor and pny optima/xlr8 are more than adequate. sandisk ultra ii is also a good value.

Having done the upgrade to SSD on several Windows machines I would suggest you investigate a drive that has a "migration kit" included. This typically only bumps the price up by about $10 but does make life amazingly simple. The kit usually includes a cable and specialized software that completely handles the task of making a bootable copy of your old drive onto the new drive. Then you simply install the new drive into the normal location. I have only ever encountered one glitch (I've installed three SSD drives) in that afterwards a printer didn't work and simply reinstalling the driver took care of that issue.

I usually work with Samsung or Sandisk drives, although from the migration software standpoint I find the Samsung easier to work with.

OWC implemented their own TRIM a couple years ago. Or figured out a work around for apples lack of support. Or something like that, they have all kinds of info on their website if you want to read about it. Personally, I would just go with their offering and know that if for some reason you have trouble with it they will take care of you.

The main thing is being able to implement TRIM. I'm not sure older macs can use apples new version.

I put in their ram upgrade and a couple of years later their SSD. 2009 MacBook, still running strong.

Carbon Copy Cloner will move your system to the new drive. Of course you will need an enclosure for your current drive OR you will have to make a copy to an external drive then swap the internal drive then copy the copy to the new internal.

Be careful to back up your photos when using SSD, TRIM will literally delete every trace of files, and there is no recovery options, believe me, I know...............and I don't use SSDs for storing photos

Left Handed Brisket wrote in post #17710979
OWC implemented their own TRIM a couple years ago. Or figured out a work around for apples lack of support. Or something like that, they have all kinds of info on their website if you want to read about it. Personally, I would just go with their offering and know that if for some reason you have trouble with it they will take care of you.

http://blog.macsales.c​om …o-trim-owc-has-the-answer discusses what OWC implemented for Apple.

So do you HAVE to use TRIM with an SSD? I simply bought a cheap SSD from Amazon (A basic OCZ IIRC) for my old Dell laptop, installed it and at the same time installed Win 7 64 Bit instead of Vista. I knew nothing about TRIM and did nothing to set it up. Not long after I installed the SSD I had an issue where about 100GB of RAW files were lost from the drive. I had run out of space while trying to transfer files. I still had one day of two days shooting. When I asked about recovery on here I was pointed to a couple of recovery options, but was then told that TRIM would have completely removed them if they had been deleted. I ran the recovery after putting the drive in an external caddy and using another computer and was able to successfully recover all of the missing images from the SSD.

I still haven't looked at TRIM and the computer seems to be running fine on Win 7 64 bit.

Alan

http://mashtips.com/ss​d-tools-for-mac/

Scroll down a bit to the part about Chameleon. It is an optimization tool for Solid State Drive on Mac OS X system.

I have the very same laptop, I upgraded to 8 GB of ram and an SSD (trim activated in MacOS), works like a charm with Lightroom and Photoshop CC. It still take ages to export, but that's because of a CPU.

BigAl007 wrote in post #17711580
So do you HAVE to use TRIM with an SSD? I simply bought a cheap SSD from Amazon (A basic OCZ IIRC) for my old Dell laptop, installed it and at the same time installed Win 7 64 Bit instead of Vista. I knew nothing about TRIM and did nothing to set it up. Not long after I installed the SSD I had an issue where about 100GB of RAW files were lost from the drive. I had run out of space while trying to transfer files. I still had one day of two days shooting. When I asked about recovery on here I was pointed to a couple of recovery options, but was then told that TRIM would have completely removed them if they had been deleted. I ran the recovery after putting the drive in an external caddy and using another computer and was able to successfully recover all of the missing images from the SSD.

I still haven't looked at TRIM and the computer seems to be running fine on Win 7 64 bit.

Alan

TRIM is simply of the way the SSD deletes file(s), it is completely different from platter drives as you can imagine

If your laptop accepts PCI-e cards wait 'til October.
If no, then buy a new one in October

http://www.forbes.com …-make-pcs-fly-in-october/