I’ve recently completed a hard drive upgrade on a 2010 Macbook Pro which has revolutionised its performance, replacing the traditional hard drive with a Samsung solid state drive (SSD). SSD’s have no moving parts and are therefore less prone to mechanical damage. However, their real benefit lies in terms of their blistering speed. Read and write times can be up to 8 x faster than normal drives making your system run that much faster. Boot up times are now be calculated in seconds rather than minutes!
This generation of Macbook only comes with a SATA 2 interface, which limits the data speeds that this Samsung SSD is capable of to a maximum of 3Gb per sec. Inside a 2011 or later Macbook, with a SATA 3 interface, you could be looking at even faster read and write speeds.
SSD’s are still relatively expensive when compared to traditional hard drives of the same size, so a good compromise is to fit a smaller capacity SSD and load your operating system and applications on it whilst retaining your existing hard drive, employed either as an external drive or, as in this case, to rehouse it in a purpose made hard disk caddy that fits into the optical drive bay of your Macbook. You can then keep all your documents, photos and videos on it. Ok, so you lose a built in dvd drive, but hey who really needs one these days!
Fancy turbo charging your Mac? Give the Surgery a ring today and book your machine in for the upgrade of a lifetime.
