PSA Sandisk ultra II 960GB SSD £142.99 on amazon

Mkjackary

on amazon, it has gone on lightening deal a couple of times now for that price. I got one and a usb 3.0 to sata adapter to transfer all my stuff over from my current hard drive to this one for £138.18 with the nus discount as well as the promotions.

considering 500GB ssds are still over 100 that is dirt cheap. cheapest it has ever been too

will be interesting to see how much of a performance boost i get when compared to a tb sshd

redrighthand

That didn't last long!

Mkjackary

if it goes on sale again ill update the thread

Mkjackary

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00M8ABHVQ?ref_=gbps_tit_s-3_3127_45235639&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE back at that price until the end of the day

entee

wouldn't even know where to start transferring OS etc......  shame as fancy an SSD to speed things up a bit

MartinBlythe

entee said:

wouldn't even know where to start transferring OS etc......  shame as fancy an SSD to speed things up a bit

I have just upgraded my hard drive (now SSD) and RAM (16GB). As I already have a seagate external HD I used the detachable cable to plug the new SSD into my mac. I downloaded a free programme that apple recommend called carbon copy (14day trial I think) and just cloned the whole hard drive. Plug the new SSD in to my mac and no issues. 

I can't recommend changing the RAM and HD to SSD enough. My 2011 macbook pro is so much faster now. For £150 I did the upgrade which is now has better spec than my 2015 macbook. 

paulads

Massive +1 for upgrading to an SSD...my 2010 MacBook Pro now has one and they are incredible... I'd also buy a £10 external HD caddy too and use your old drive as extra storage/backup and to transfer your files across with. Win/Win :-)

Sporky

Ah - thank you! One of my drives is getting full so this'll be my new applications drive and the old one can be for documents only.

Mkjackary

be careful of those sata to usb3 cables! I ordered one and it didn't work, I emailed the retailer and it doesn't work with windows 10, /it would have been nice if they put it in the description or title, anywhere....

I have ordered another one so all should be good, as long as that one works, make sure it works with your operating system first.

Sporky

I have one from the Samsung SSD I upgraded my OS drive to a while back.

smogfalls

I have a 2011 iMac 27" that I'm wanting to upgrade the ram on and like the idea of another, faster hard drive too. I currently also have 2 external FireWire drives.
Forgive me, but I don't quite understand this SSD drive though. Is it an external drive or would I need to open up my computer and actually install it inside? And is the intention that you would move just the OS onto the SSD and use the original internal drive for other files?

Sporky

It's just the drive itself; you can put it into an appropriate external housing, but as it is it would go inside the compuper.

To get most benefit from it I would suggest that you transfer everything you can onto the SSD - definitely the OS, probably any big/frequently used applications too. If you can fit your documents on it all good, but my plan is to keep my existing 120Gb SSD for just the OS, the new 960Gb for applications and use the old hybrid SSD/HDD for documents.

SRich

This sounds really appealing - I have a 2011 MacBook Pro which is also getting reeeeeaaal slow on boot-up, noticeably so since the 'upgrade' to Mavericks - I have totally ruled out El Capitan until they get all the bugs out of it.

Although not a Luddite, flipping open the casing and replacing the existing with an SSD sounds like something for 'the experts'.....is it relatively intuitive?

I see the SanDisk Ultra II SSD 960is back up in price probabaly as a bunch of Fretboarders have each bought one and upp'd the ante!

 

Sporky

On a Max I honestly don't know.

For PC my Sansung came with the USB adaptor and some cloning software, and it worked perfectly. I left it for an hour or so (though I don't think it took that long), swapped the drives over and it booted and worked straight off, no fuss.

smogfalls

@sporky thanks for clearing that up for me... wish I could order one and upgrade, but I really wouldn't be comfortable in fitting it myself. Don't suppose anyone in the Nottingham area would be capable/willing to do it for me? I would pay of course!

Alex

smogfalls

p.s: if I put the SSD into a housing and used it as an external drive, would I plug it in via USB?... and is this just as fast/reliable as installing it internally? Would I still be able to run the OS off it this way?

Danny1969

SRich said:

This sounds really appealing - I have a 2011 MacBook Pro which is also getting reeeeeaaal slow on boot-up, noticeably so since the 'upgrade' to Mavericks - I have totally ruled out El Capitan until they get all the bugs out of it.

Although not a Luddite, flipping open the casing and replacing the existing with an SSD sounds like something for 'the experts'.....is it relatively intuitive?

I see the SanDisk Ultra II SSD 960is back up in price probabaly as a bunch of Fretboarders have each bought one and upp'd the ante!

 

Buy the drive and a USB to sata caddie. Then hold CMD and R at startup to go into recovery. From there disk utility - and clone internal drive to external. Your new drive is now a clone of the old one

Ground yourself by touching a Radiator or similar. Then remove 10 screws holding bottom cover of Macbook Pro. Unscrew and bracket holding down the side of the harddrive and the 2 small screws holding down the flex cable and gently pull drive out ..... be very careful with the flex cable it's easily damaged. Then remove the 4 torx screws from the old drive and put them in the new drive - assembly then just the reverse of what you have done. 

Once booted up use disc utility to resize the partition if needed - depending on how you do it cloning a 128 to  500Gb drive means the 500Gb is viewed as a 128Gb until you resize it. With Capitan you can just drag the pointer round in disk utility

The other way is to fit new drive from the start, connect to ethernet and internet and install clean OS. Then connect old drive via USB when prompted and OSX will automatically import all you docs, aps and settings. 

I did a MacPro 2011 yesterday, upgrading from 128Gb SSD to 500Gb SSD. Very nice speed increase as modern SSD's are faster than old ones and very much faster than mechanical drives

SRich

Attaboy @Danny1969.............

That's what we like, step by step instructions!

Muchas G

Mkjackary

smogfalls said: p.s: if I put the SSD into a housing and used it as an external drive, would I plug it in via USB?... and is this just as fast/reliable as installing it internally? Would I still be able to run the OS off it this way?


I wouldn't, but usb 3 can handle around 5Gb/s which is about 640 MB/s, the ssd this thread is about has about a 550MB read and a 500MB write speed, so in theory the ssd is the bottle neck. In reality you probably wouldn't touch 200MB/s and would be in the 140-165MB/s range most of the time unless transferring a single large file.

Then the purpose of spending all that money on an ssd is nulled by the fact that you can get the lower ends of those speeds 140-160MB/s on a good 7200 RPM hdd.

If you want a speed increase and external ssd isn't going to do much unless you have a cheaper HDD, even then, it isn't worth it as you are spending much more for not much of a speed increase.

edit. 

Just realised you are using firewire external hard drives, that will bottle neck you to about 60-70MB/s regardless of the hard drives speed. Why not use the lightning port, lightning port speeds are around the same as usb3, even though it claims to be twice as fast.

It is 2011 imac, so it is out of warranty, so you aren't going to loose anything by going the full hog. Don't bother with external hard drives, even with usb3 (which your imac doesn't have) or lightning ports you will cap out at 200MB/s 95 percent of the time.

smogfalls

@Mkjackary ; thanks so much for all the help matey, really appreciate it. I'll drop you a PM as I'm conscious of derailing your thread with my technical inadequacy! 
Cheers again,
Alex

PVO_Dave

I installed one of these (bought in the Black Friday week sales) in my late 2009 27" iMac, made a world of difference, like having a new machine.

Bit hairy taking it apart (the first time) but not actually that bad