I recently upgraded the 320GB HDD on my MacBookPro 5.3 (mid-2009) to a Samsung SSD 840 Pro, MZ-7PD512BW model. Before I made my purchase, I had lots of questions and I didn’t find an answer on the web, even with so many resources available.
I contacted the Samsung customer care, and like all other customer services, they did not respond to the point. Eventually putting me in a fix on whether to buy Samsung’s SSD or not, the reason begin simply I did not know if that would work on model, the alternative choice was OWC.
The mid-2009 MBP model’s only support a 3Gbp/s Interface and most of the reviews on the 840 Pro MZ-7PD512BW said they do not support 3Gbp/s interface, which meant that it would not work with my machine. Samsung’s website was the only site that said it would compatible with the older interfaces (including 1.5Gbp/s). And not knowing anyone who had going in for it I finally I decided to take a risk and picked my first SSD.
There were 2 reasons why I went for this model
- They had a cash-back offer running, which meant that I would get back £40
- The cost was almost £350, which was almost the same as the 480GB Mercury Electra 3G SSD available from OWC, but my intention was to use it on a laptop if I had to buy one for my wife (she is not tech-savy)
And now that I have been using it for a month, here is my verdict
- I used SuperDuper! to take a back if my current HDD, it took me about 7hrs to back it up (phew)
- Replacing my HDD to SSD a great experience, because I had never opened my MBP myself, had seen the engineers do that when I had my RAM upgraded to 8GB (about 3 year back)
- Its was as simple as Plug-and-Play
- It took less than 5sec to start my OS X 10.7.5 with all my applications open the 1st time.
- Shutdown takes 10 sec, compared to the 1-2 minutes it used to take
- Startup take a little longer as I have added more items to my login list, but still less than 10sec with all my application
- Without my application, the startup takes about 2-3secs.
- Shutdown without any application open, take about 2-3secs.
- Launch of application take about 3-5secs, the applications generally do not bounce on the dock
The bottom line being my MBP has become far more responsive then before, just to give you a feel of what is running on my machine at any given point of time, I have 20+ apps running from the dock and about another 20+ process running on the background not the same as the application that are open. The application can vary from programming, word-processor, cloud bases services, SQL server, NoSQL server, IDE, music apps, online-radio, etc.
Tags: Samsung, SSD, 840 Pro, 512GB, MacBookPro, mid-2009, Review