If there is anyone out there debating about whether or not they should upgrade from a HDD to SSD, let there be no doubt it works beautifully!

MacBookPro mid 2010 model, 250Gb HD
Replacement SSD - Samsung 860 EVO 1.0Tb $147 on Amazon
StarTech USB 3.0 to 2.5" SATA HDD/SSD Cable $11 on Amazon
Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner, 30 day trial
Use "Disk Utility" to configured your new HD
Use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a copy of your existing HD to your new SSD

There are plenty of YouTube videos like the one linked below showing you how to do all of this. Physically, all the work takes maybe 20 minutes, but may take hours (mine took nearly 10hrs) to clone the drive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saz0-c-218E

BTW...you will need some really small screw drivers or bits. In my case I needed Phillips and Torx bits.

Honestly, this was so easy to do my kids could have done it for me. The only issue I had was one of the screws holding the MacBook outer case cover on did not want to go back into the hole. Tried swapping it out with another in the same bunch, but something must be wrong with the screw. All, but three of these are super tiny and very easy to lose and difficult to handle if you have big fingers.

Since I got such good results with this, my next upgrade will be maxing out the RAM 16Gb and replacing the battery that now holds a charge for maybe an hour.

Absolutely agree! I just migrated my PC tower's OS to an Intel 500GB SSD and it boots up even faster now (was on a Samsung 850 250GB before). Then for my Dell G3 laptop for work, I added in and migrated OS over to a 1TB HP NVMe SSD and it is even faster now. With the prices most SSDs are going for at the moment, it's an awesome upgrade!

I recently dropped a Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD into my aging Pc. It used to take a ham sandwich to boot up. As I result, I left it running 24/7.

Now it boots up in about 1/10 of the time. Definitely worthwhile upgrade.

Bonus: The HDD is still good and in a Hard Drive Caddy HDD Enclosure ... can be used via USB as a portable external HD for backups etc.

I too jumped on the Samsung 860 EVO 1Tb SSD when Amazon had it for $127 (with coupon). Cloned from my old 1Tb HDD in my 5 year old Dell Inspiron 3847 (i5-4440 @ 3.10GHz, 8Gb DDR3 RAM). Nicely kicked started the old girl into running wind sprints again!

Concur, the 860 EVO 1T SSD is the way to go. Upgraded my two 2 in 1 laptops a month ago. Easy to do and the performance is fantastic.

Did the same to my 2011 MB Pro, and boy, what a difference !
Also did the 16GB of RAM as well. Like getting a new computer.
The only bottleneck now is the video card/memory. Not much can be done with that, unfortunately.

quote:

Originally posted by VictimNoMore:
The only bottleneck now is the video card/memory. Not much can be done with that, unfortunately.

Agree. About the only thing is to check bios and see how much system memory is allocated for display. Usually it's maxed out at about 512MB on most systems.

I upgraded my I5 Toshiba laptop with a 1Tb SSD and doubled the memory from 8 gig to 16 gig.

I can now boot up, password, and have sigforum loaded in under 10 seconds.

Now if Windows did not have to update and reconfigure everything every time one turns the dang thing off.
I did an SSD in my desktop and it is a touch quicker.
I have a laptop I need to get around to do.

Good information! Been thinking about doing this as well, just needed some motivation.