We call this our "Four R method", because each step starts with the letter R. We have tried to show exactly what you need to do in simple steps.
All that experience is distilled in this guide.
We have helped thousands of people with Apple computers upgrade their Macs. When you buy from Upgradeable, local tech support is just a phone call away. This guide is just an example of how we try to over deliver our customer service. There is a reason most new Macs only come with SSDs.
Start using your Mac the way it was designed to be used.fast and no waiting. So when your Mac runs out of ram and pages to the SSD (uses the SSD as RAM) then it does not slow down, because an SSD is really like a big RAM drive! That's why I (and you) can get away with 8GB of RAM. The SSD is also made from flash chips that are almost as fast as the RAM. The SSD knows where it all your data is instantaneously. With an SSD, there is no waiting, this is because your data is effectively in a spreadsheet. A traditional hard drive is like a record player, when you send data from the HDD to the CPU the computer has to find it, it hunts around the platters looking for all the data. It is not the raw speed of the SSD, it is how it works. I dont have to wait for the CPU to catch up, there is no spinning beachball, there is no lag. I edited the images for this article in Photoshop, uploaded them to our server using Cyberduck, and I'm running Mail and Excel in the background. I'm running two browsers (Firefox and Chrome.
I am typing this article on a 2010 Macbook Pro with 8GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD drive. A RAM upgrade is easy, a Mac SSD upgrade is a bit harder, but with this guide you'll be an expert with all the knowledge to make an SSD upgrade simple.įor general use, most modern Macbooks have enough CPU power. Replace it with an SSD, and the speed increase is incredible. The second bottleneck is your the hard drive. (Did you expect that bit of truth from the Mac memory upgrade guys?) You really only need 8GB and an SSD for a super speedy Mac. If it is a choice between 16GB and an SSD, choose an SSD. You need at least 8GB of RAM for the current macOS. Applications will open quicker, starting up is snappy, and the overall result is extending the life of your Mac.įirst bottleneck is RAM. Fix both and you can make your Mac run like new. There are two speed bottlenecks in a Macbook Pro notebook.
The Envoy Pro EX USB-C is the fastest external USB SSD we’ve tested to date, it’s IP67 certified, and it offers 4TB of capacity in a form factor no larger than the 2TB competition. Also on board are a Gigabyte GC-Alpine Thunderbolt 3 card and Softperfect’s Ramdisk 3.4.6, which is used for the 48GB read and write tests.
Additional tests were run on a Windows 10 64-bit PC using a Core i7-5820K/Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard with four 16GB Kingston 2666MHz DDR4 modules, a Zotac (Nvidia) GT 710 1GB x2 PCIe graphics card, and an Asmedia ASM2142 USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gbps) card. How we tested: We used a 15-inch 2018 MacBook Pro with a 2.9GHz Core i9 processor, 32GB of memory, a 2TB SSD, and 4GB Radeon Pro 560X graphics using Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test. We didn’t have them to test, so that’s not fact, but a caveat based on past experience. Note that the lower capacity variants might not offer the same level of write performance. That said, 1GBps is about all you’ll ever see from any SuperSpeed 10Gbps device in the real world, so just about any NVMe SSD is workable with small data sets. The roll-your-own option might save you a few bucks if you opt for a bargain basement drive, but OWC isn’t charging all the much more per gigabyte, and the Aura P12 seems to be a nice solid performer that, again, is really not that expensive. You can also purchase the enclosure unpopulated (no drive) for $60, if you want to roll your own. It’s also available from OWC as a bare SSD for internal use.Īt $1100, the 4TB Envoy Pro EX USB-C is hardly cheap, but considering its bleeding edge capacity, and that the bare Aura P12 is over $1000, that’s really not bad. The secret to the Envoy Pro EX USB-C’s large capacity is that it houses one of the first 4TB M.2 NVMe SSDs to hit the market-the Aura P12.