My experience with the Sandisk Ultra II 960Gb on a Macbook Pro Early 2011

The Sandisk Ultra II 960Gb drive was bought from Amazon. It arrived within a couple of days. So what was the intention? It was to replace the original 1Tb mechanical drive with an SSD because the MacBook was painfully sluggish and almost unusable.

To swap them around I had to clone the original drive to ensure I retained all the installed programs and data. This was done using a separately purchased drive case and USB cable. The cloning process was done using Carbon Copy Cloner. Once done it was just a matter of opening up the back of the MacBook, taking out the original drive and replacing it with the Sandisk SSD. Put the MacBook back cover back and boot up the MacBook. 

The result was OUTSTANDING. What took ages now was almost instant. Booting took about 8 to 10 seconds. Compared to minutes. Loading up Adobe InDesign which took over one and a half minutes now took about 12 seconds (it’s gone slower since -  when Adobe released a newer version). 

So what’s the takeaway? The change is dramatic. What was a vintage MacBook is now at least 10x faster. The impact of upgrading system memory from 4Gb RAM to 8Gb RAM made minimal impact apart from allowing me to load up bigger spreadsheets and graphic files otherwise no impact on boot or program load times. But the SSD on the other hand resulted in MASSIVE performance boost. 

So if you have an old laptop that needs a new lease of life then an SSD upgrade will do just that. A further takeaway is go for the very largest SSD capacity ypu can afford. 500Gb or 1Tb because disc space will be swiftly eaten up if you store photos or work with graphic files using packages such as Adobe.

Here’s my system report on my SSD drive.

Intel 6 Series Chipset:

  Vendor: Intel

  Product: 6 Series Chipset

  Link Speed: 6 Gigabit

  Negotiated Link Speed: 6 Gigabit

  Physical Interconnect: SATA

  Description: AHCI Version 1.30 Supported

SanDisk Ultra II 960GB:

  Capacity: 960.2 GB (960,197,124,096 bytes)

  Model: SanDisk Ultra II 960GB                  

  Revision: X41100RL

  Serial Number: <removed from this report by me>

  Native Command Queuing: Yes

  Queue Depth: 32

  Removable Media: No

  Detachable Drive: No

  BSD Name: disk0

  Medium Type: Solid State

  TRIM Support: No

  Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)

  S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified

  Volumes:

EFI:

  Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)

  File System: MS-DOS FAT32

  BSD Name: disk0s1

  Content: EFI

  Volume UUID:<removed from this report by me>

disk0s2:

  Capacity: 959.2 GB (959,203,147,776 bytes)

  BSD Name: disk0s2

  Content: Apple_CoreStorage

Recovery HD:

  Capacity: 650 MB (650,002,432 bytes)

  File System: Journaled HFS+

  BSD Name: disk0s3

  Content: Apple_Boot

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