When the new drive arrived from B&H, I popped open the MacBook and made the switch in 10 minutes or so. I then performed a current backup of my system drive using Time Machine. Of course, even after the purge, performance of the spinning internal drive was still crappy. This program is worth a few minutes of your time regardless if you are switching hard drives or not. I ended up with over 300GB free space when I finished deleting all the extraneous Lightroom backups, Premiere preview files and other non-essential crap. I had roughly 20GB of free space when I started the purge. I used a very handy (and free) program called Free Disk Space, which you can find here in the App Store. In preparation for the upgrade, I cleaned up the internal drive by deleting a ton of files that had bloated the storage usage over the past three years. And while the Thunderbolt connectivity has been great, the internal 5400RPM hard drive has gotten slower and slower over the years.Īfter hearing plenty of reports on the benefits of upgrading to an internal SSD drive in these MacBook models, I finally bit the (surprising affordable) bullet and picked up a Crucial 512GB SSD for a little over $200. It’s a 2011 model, which I believe is the first model with Thunderbolt. And hugely effective.I had an aging MacBook Pro. (I found them at my local Ace Hardware.)Īs you'll see in the video below, my colleague Sharon Profis resurrected her 2009 MacBook Pro with an SSD and agrees with me that the process is simple and straightforward. Really, the hardest part of the whole thing was tracking down a size 6T torx-head screwdriver for the four torx screws that help hold the hard drive in place. The whole procedure took less than an hour (not counting the half a day it took to clone my MacBook's hard drive to the SSD). I replaced my 2011-era MacBook Pro's 500GB hard drive with the 500GB Samsung 850 Evo. And they aren't nearly as costly per gigabyte as they once were. They are more energy efficient, more reliable and quieter than hard drives with magnetic, spinning disks. There's a reason that all modern MacBooks and the vast majority of all laptops sold today use SSDs. If you have an old MacBook Pro with one foot in the grave, the single best thing you can do to breathe new life into it is replace its traditional spinning hard drive with a solid-state drive.

Intel solid state drive for macbook pro