On Mar 29, 2016, at 2:15 PM, John Robinson <[email protected]> wrote:
> My 2009 MacBook Pro (with the removable battery) is needing a new drive, it’s > slower than watching corn grow. I want to get a new Macbook but will wait > until the new models come out later this year. My daughter is wanting a > laptop so I might be able to fix this one for her to use. That’s still a pretty capable machine, even seven years later. I still use one as my main machine for writing and email because it’s got a good display, nice keyboard and dual-core 2.4 GHz processor. The newer machines often seem faster, not because their hardware is so much better, but because of the SSD drives. > Any suggestions as to what is a good brand, where to purchase? Pretty much any 2.5” SATA drive should work. My solution, a little more than a year ago, was to compromise with a Seagate ST1000DX hybrid drive. This is a 1 TB spinning drive with a built-in 8 GB solid-state cache. It’s kind of like Apple’s Mechanical/SSD Fusion drive combo. The firmware on the drive watches which files you use most often and keeps them in the cache, so it’s pretty fast loading the programs you always use — after it learns what they are. You can pick up such a drive for $75 or so. A year ago, SSDs were still pretty expensive, but they’ve come down in price so much over the last year, that I’d probably go with one of those now. Before buying one, do a little research to get a drive supported by the TRIM in El Capitan and learn how to turn it on. Otherwise, the performance of your SSD will degrade over time. Don’t expect spectacular SSD performance off that machine because it’s got a slower SATA bus than the newer machines. You may be able to improve it a lot by making sure you’ve installed Apple’s firmware patches which raised the link speed from 1.5 Gb/s to 3.0 Gb/s. It made a real difference on my machine. The upgrades weren’t available on all the 2009 machines. L^2
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