2011 Macbook Pro Harddrive upgrade question

[tonytiger55]

I have a (dont laugh) 2011 Macbook Pro running High Sierra.

Its been running fine until recent. Its slowing down, I think its just down to the old hard drive as it makes a shit ton of noise. I had a similar issue on my Windows 98 Intel Pentum 2 back in 2003. I replaced the hardrive and boosted the ram and it ran fine all the way till 2007 I shit you not. But thats another story.

I can't afford a new laptop right now. Im think about having the internal drive updated with a solid state. Has anyone done this or have any thoughts?

https://www.businessinsider.com/macb...ith-ssd-2015-2

[J.M.]

Definitely get a new SSD, they're pretty cheap now. What's the size of the hard drive in your MBP?

[Kavy]

My wife’s MacBook is a 2012 with a 256 ssd and 8gb of ram and it comical how fast it actually runs. Well worth the upgrade.

[D'z Nutz]

Nothing to laugh at. I'm still rocking my mid 2012 as my daily machine and i love it. Upgrading to an SSD and maxing out the RAM makes a huge difference. While you're at it, if you're not using your optical disk drive, you can replace it with a hard drive caddy for additional storage. My MacBook pro is running with an SSD for the main drive and i replaced the optical drive with the 500gb hard drive it came with just for movies and files.

I have an extra hard drive caddy if you are interested.

[tonytiger55]

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Definitely get a new SSD, they're pretty cheap now. What's the size of the hard drive in your MBP?

HD is about 512G I think. Half is used. Its mostly Gro pro vids from my travels. I have it backed up on a external harddrive.

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Nothing to laugh at. I'm still rocking my mid 2012 as my daily machine and i love it. Upgrading to an SSD and maxing out the RAM makes a huge difference. While you're at it, if you're not using your optical disk drive, you can replace it with a hard drive caddy for additional storage. My MacBook pro is running with an SSD for the main drive and i replaced the optical drive with the 500gb hard drive it came with just for movies and files.

I have an extra hard drive caddy if you are interested.

Thanks for the offer. Will let you know if I get the upgrade done.

I'l look into the upgrade this December or Jan.

Question.
1. My OS has been upgrade after upgrade. Did you guys do a clean OS install after?
2. I just paid up MS Office for one year. Do you know if this can be transferred over to the new drive? Im assuming this is natually done when you do a backup of the hardrive?

[D'z Nutz]

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Question.
1. My OS has been upgrade after upgrade. Did you guys do a clean OS install after?
2. I just paid up MS Office for one year. Do you know if this can be transferred over to the new drive? Im assuming this is natually done when you do a backup of the hardrive?

No, I just do a couple Time Machine backups before swapping hard drives, and the restore from Time Machine after I put in the new hard drive and pick up right where I left off. This saves all your preferences, licenses, etc.

[GT.....O?]

Funny enough i just ordered parts last night off amazon.

My MacBook is from 2010 so slightly different ram, so only upgraded the ram from 4gb to 8 gb, and grabbed a new 500 gb Samsung 860 evo SSD.


All in, I'm just over 200 bucks with a USB to Sata III cable to transfer everything over to the new drive. I have a NAS drive at home so most of big files (movies and back up docs) are on there, just using the new drive for small backup and to get things faster. No need for the optical drive.

You should be able to upgrade to 16gb of Ram for around 120 bucks, and the samsung SSDs are on sale right now for 25% off. I think the 500 gb one was like 120 bucks.

From my youtube video understanding, if you want blazing fast you could get the optical drive caddy and run 2x 250 gb SSDs in raid for crazy read/write speeds, but probably not necessary.

I don't want to dump too much money in as its still an old machine, and the other parts are could easily fail in the next year or two. My machine won't even allow me to download the new MacOS Mojave. haha