• SSD Performance tuning guide for MacBook Pro

    Last year I upgraded from a HDD to SSD on my ~5 year old macbook pro. I must admit, it was money well spent. It skyrocketed the performance of my old laptop and has made the laptop usable for next few years. However recently I ran tests on the SSD and was shocked to notice a sharp drop in read/write speeds. From 250MB/s, the read/write speed had dropped to under 50MB/s. While applications were loading fine and boot time was still acceptable, I was concerned about the disk reliability. Here are some steps I took to tune the SSD and get back to original performance. These tips are mac os…

  • Upgrading Macbook Pro 15-inch Mid 2009 unibody HDD to SSD

    Recently I went through the process of replacing the hard disk drive (HDD) with a Solid State Drive (SSD) in my laptop (MacBook Pro 2009). And to say that the laptop performance has increased will be an understatement. It has nitro boosted for a 5 year old laptop (which still runs on SATA II). Booting time has reduced from 120+ seconds to under 30 seconds. Applications such as iTunes, iPhoto, Eclipse open in less than 3 seconds. Check the read/write speed of the drive in the screenshot below (remember on SATA II, the maximum transfer cannot exceed 300MB/s). There is already enough literature about SSD vs HDD and why you…