2010 MBP HDD Upgrade

BennyC

BennyC

BennyC

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25 Sep 2006
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Clean out the crap, put big media on external storage and put a SSD in there.

The performance increase will impress you.
 
Tempting.

I stream most of my media to ATV, does it not need to be on my MBP in order for this to happen?

I bought a TimeCapsule earlier in the year but found it not to be 'Plug and play' at all so took it back.
 
What shiver said. SSD is the best performance upgrade and you can get 240gb ones for not much money these days, thus allowing you to stream what you need to locally and then when done, store it on external storage!
 
To be honest even the bigger 480 and 1tb drives aren't mad money any more.
Plenty of storage and blazing fast.
 
SSD is the way forward tbh. I'm tempted to do this to my iMac but not sure how difficult it would be.
 
Maccy said:
SSD is the way forward tbh. I'm tempted to do this to my iMac but not sure how difficult it would be.
Click to expand...

Pretty difficult but can be done. I believe you need to remove the screen/glass display in order to access the HDD on an iMac. I'm guessing these new thinner iMacs would be even more tricky. :o
 
I put an SSD in my 2010 MBP and took it back out again. I didn't notice any great difference in boot up times or application launch times. Which may have been to the SSD being SATA 3, as opposed to the SATA 2 interface on the 2010. Whereas upgrading the HDD to SSD in my 2012 Mac Mini there was a very real difference in boot up times and application launch times, but I don't know if that is then down to the better CPU as well as the SATA interface.
 
Really?

An SSD made a massive difference to my 2011. SATA2 vs SATA3 makes very little difference in my experience (not in the Mac), most of the benefit comes from the near-zero access times.
 
MagicBoy said:
Really?

An SSD made a massive difference to my 2011. SATA2 vs SATA3 makes very little difference in my experience (not in the Mac), most of the benefit comes from the near-zero access times.
Click to expand...

Yup. Apparently 2011 late (October) refreshes used SATA 3. I'd have kept the SSD in it if I'd felt it was a vast improvement. But for me it wasn't. Didn't matter though as I ordered the Mac Mini and threw the SSD in that and took the 1TB HDD from the Mac Mini and put it in the MBP.

Edit: Checking wikipedia, early 2011 MBPs used SATA 3 as well.
 
I have a mid 2009 MBP and installed a 240GB SSD 2 years ago. The speed is instantly clear, it boots in under 10 seconds and applications launch with 1 or 2 bounces. It's the best thing you could do to breath new life into it. You'll winner why you didn't do it earlier!
 
I was running an OCZ Vertex 3 in a then 6 year old Asus PC board with a couple of SATA2 ports. Boot times to a useable desktop dropped from about 90 seconds to 15 seconds. Same drive (and Windows) install are in the current Haswell machine and I can't see any perceptible performance increase running at SATA3, although the benchmarks look way quicker (400MB+ vs 230MB when capped by the SATA2 bus).

Mate of mine has the same 512GB M4 in a 2010 MBP and it's just as quick booting and launching apps as my late 2011 even thought it's SATA 2 limited.

The 2011's are the same logic board, just with a speedbump on the CPU, and the 6490 got pensioned off. Well the one's that still work!
 
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I don't actually turn any of my machines off, so that's probably why I'm spoiled for boot times :D. All my machines simply go into a sleep state as it's quicker to wake from sleep than hibernate. So even a 15 second boot time for me would be considered slow.
 
If I'm honest I'm the same with the MBP. It goes weeks sometimes months without a reboots, usually requested eventually by an Apple security update. Any application opening within a single bounce, and the ability to boot a VM in parallels in about 10 seconds are most excellent. Plus it's generally much more responsive. The 5400rpm drive was really holding the machine back.

PC is mainly a gaming box so that's turned off when not in use.

Surface Pro ... the "sleep" and suspend battery life is terrible. So that gets powered off frequently.. Fortunately it's the quickest booting Windows device I've ever seen - under 8 seconds from cold.
 
BennyC said:
So the 320GB in my MBP is almost full to the brim, with lots of junk amongst it.

A fresh install is long overdue (4 years) as is a HDD upgrade. I'm eying up the following:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-399-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=896

But wondered if there were better alternatives available?

If anyone could recommend a simple process to install OSX on the new drive that'd be great :)

Thanks,

BennyC
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Get a SSD. It will make a huge difference. And here's an alternative to consider. If you're not using your DVD, stick in a hdd caddy with your original drive in there.
 
I was ready to throw my 2011 MBP out with all the load times and hangs. Stuck an SSD in there and its like a brand new machine! Immediate opening of my applications is outrageous.
 
Maccy said:
SSD is the way forward tbh. I'm tempted to do this to my iMac but not sure how difficult it would be.
Click to expand...

I did it to mine. Have a search in this forum its been asked about a few times and there's quite a bit of info.

FTR its not difficult its just time consuming :)
 
Maccy said:
Have a feeling it's a 3.5" disk in my iMac though, can you get SSDs in 3.5"?
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Yes you can.

There is an area which it fits perfectly into, almost asif it was made for it ;)

I'm contemplating upgrade the 1TB drive in mine I have running in conjunction with it, umming and ahhring at the minute.
 
I would consider a smaller capacity SSD, looking at a 750GB sata, if I could easily & successfully stream to ATV/Mac.

What would I need? I'm looking at £50 for a Sata HDD upgrade and don't really want to spend a fortune on networking/streaming gear which normally just leaves with a headache and empty wallet :(
 
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