[geeks] SSD for MacBook Unibody

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2014, hike wrote:

> There are a lot of different SSD on the market and I am seeking
> recommendations for good and better brands and models.
>
> I have looked on Amazon and MacSales and have read reviews in the past
> about the technology behind SSDs.
>
> I have a MacBook7.1 b The 2010 MacBook Unibody (the last model of
> MacBook).
>
> Any suggestions (brand, models, what to look for, etc.) will be greatly
> appreciated.

I installed a 960GB Crucial M500 SSD into my MacBookPro8,3 last month, and
it's so-far performed admirably.  It does get a little warmer under strain
than I'd expected, and the power draw is about the same as the
spinning-rust storage device that the laptop shipped with.

Most things are modestly faster (I suspend more than I reboot), but VMware
disk access is _much_ faster, which was my largest complaint about the
stock disk.  Applying updates of any sort (OS X updates that require a
reboot, Windows updates inside VMware, etc.) would steal an hour of
productive time before, and now only take a few minutes.  More to the
point, if the updates are happening in the VM, I can still work outside
the VM and not be reduced to next-day delivery of disk blocks.

What drew me to the Crucial device over the Samsung was this review:

   http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crucial-m500-1tb-ssd,3551.html

Specifically, the Crucial device looks to have slightly worse power
consumption and slightly worse random I/O throughput, but better
power-loss semantics, more redundant flash cells, and fewer bits per cell.

I get 6 - 8 hours on a charge with a spinning disk, and seek times were my
main complaint, so I opted for what seemed to be a more reliable device
than a slightly faster/cooler one.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Elgin, TX
USA