Home Forums Hardware Mac Desktops & Notebooks Upgraded to an SSD...WOW!!!

I don't think anybody has ever posted the outcome of an upgrade from an HDD to an SSD (I followed Virtual 1's lead.), so here goes…

Despite the fact that my April 2010 15" MacBook Pro (2.66GHz/Core i7) is SATA II and I don't get the full benefit of the SATA III (SanDisk) drive I bought (to replace my 7200 RPM SATA III HGST), the difference is still stunning…I feel like I got a new, top of the line machine, and for only $200 (for a 480Gb drive).

My Xbench has gone from 205 to 310, with virtually all of the increment in my Disk Test score (but with tiny increments across the board).

Booting, shutting down, and everything in between is (Edit: considerably) faster, snappier, zippier - pick your adjective - as is cloning and drag & drop, both between internal partitions and from my FireWire 800 external to my internal.

Obviously, I'm a very happy camper, and I can't imagine any reason to not heartily recommend the upgrade to all!

Caveat: SSDs are relatively expensive, and the drives in many new model Macs are not user serviceable, so unless you're planning to keep your current Mac for some time, planning to buy a new one with a swappable drive, or just plain have money to burn, an SSD may not be right for you.

Since you mentioned price as a consideration, a Fusion drive is not a bad option either and a lot less $$$ than full SSD. You will get 90% or more of the speed because the OS, frequently used apps, and the various swap and cache files will be on the SSD portion leaving seldom used apps and data files on the rotating media. If you have two available slots say an HD and optical drives and a little help from OWC you can roll your own Fusion drive.

Thanks for mentioning Fusions; I completely forgot about them, because I long ago wrote them off as a non-viable alternative because they're mechanical, and I never even considered their cost as a possible factor.

My iMac has a fusion drive (see my signature) and it is noticeably faster than my cloned backup drive (SATA in an OWC Thunderbolt enclosure). In fact, the difference is pronounced. The iMac cold boots in less than 15 seconds.

I'll guess that both your iMac and fusion drive are SATA III and that you are, therefore, seeing even better performance than I am with my II/III setup.

(I measure boot time from chime to desktop, and that has dropped from 33 sec to 11 since I installed my SSD. )

I looked in System Information (formerly System Profiler) under SATA and didn't see anything about SATA III or any other flavor. Whatever it is, I'm a happy camper.

Working from Mactracker, you've got a 2014 version of the Late 2013 27" iMac (which is still in production).

Under "Connections and Expansion", you'll see

"Hard Drive Interface 1 - 6.0 Gbps Serial ATA (SATA)"

the 6.0Gbps SATA being SATA III (SATA II is 3.0Gbps.). You'll see the same thing in System Information.

Yeah, I imagine that you're a very happy camper, even compared to my state of happy-camperness.

Actually, Jon has the iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014), which differs from the iMac (27-inch, Late 2013) in several ways: a faster processor, an upgraded graphics processor, and most notably, a Retina display.

Oops!

I made a bad assumption based on the fact that there's no specifically Retina iMac listed in my Mactracker...because, I assume, it was added in a version to which I can't update because of my OS.

Got to keep that in mind!

At any rate, Jon's iMac is undoubtedly SATA III.

Although Is A SATA 3Gb/s Platform Still Worth Upgrading With An SSD? is a PC article, (to thoroughly inexpert me, anyhow) it appears to be comprehensive and sounds authoritative, and I imagine that its results are similar to what you'd see with a Mac. (The graphs in item 12 are easiest to deal with. [AS SSD Benchmark is PC software])

The article is pertinent in that it compares the performance of a top of the line SATA III SSD with both SATA II & III interfaces alongside that of a fastest-at-the-time 10,000 RPM SATA III WD VelociRaptor HDD with a SATA III interface.

The comparison is an eye-opener.

(There's probably a similar Mac oriented article, but this floated to the top of the Google page and seemed to suffice.)