#MACBOOK PRO SSD DRIVE STRIP UPGRADE#
#MACBOOK PRO SSD DRIVE STRIP FULL#
#MACBOOK PRO SSD DRIVE STRIP PROFESSIONAL#
#MACBOOK PRO SSD DRIVE STRIP MAC#

#MACBOOK PRO SSD DRIVE STRIP MAC#

I hope you find the right Mac to fit all of your needs, and when you need or want an upgrade, we’ll be here! Usually you have to wait a little while until the brand new macs are on refurb, or if your good with last years models you can save a significant amount of money.īest of luck on your next Mac purchase. Heck, you could save even more and buy an Apple refurb which are just as good as new. The short, the standard MacBook Pro is a crazy upgradeable machine that, also doesn’t have some of the issue the Retina display causes.

#MACBOOK PRO SSD DRIVE STRIP UPGRADE#

(Prices vary due to sales and market conditions of course)… but That would come in at $1939 or $2049, plus you can choose to replace out the optical on use the original hard drive in the optical bay as a portable time machine or just for extra storage, and you could upgrade the memory to 16GB if you ever need to. You say a MBP with an SSD is more expensive than a MBP Retina? You could get the 2.3 GHz MacBook Pro 15″ fro $1,799, which is the same speed as the Retina, and add you choice and size of OWC SSD be it 120GB for around $130-$140 or the 240GB for around $250.

#MACBOOK PRO SSD DRIVE STRIP PROFESSIONAL#

While Apple’s flagship MacBook Pro may be the Retina Display model, for professional users who require professional performance, the clear winner is a 2012 MacBook Pro 15″ with an OWC Data Doubler and a pair of OWC 6G SSDs in a Striped RAID. Yow! With this setup, we averaged over 1000MB/s read speeds and write speeds that nearly hit 900MB/s. That completely blows the MacBook Pro with Retina Display out of the water!

Yes, we decided to go all out and put the two drives in a Striped RAID to see how fast we could get

#MACBOOK PRO SSD DRIVE STRIP FULL#

So, considering that all the other components (memory capacity, processor speed, bus speed) can be configured nearly identically, just dropping a single OWC 6G SSD into your a 2012 MacBook Pro 15 can boost its performance on par with, or even a little past) the MacBook Pro with Retina Display.īut wait… the MacBook Pro 15” has two drive bays, each capable of running an OWC 6G SSD at full 6Gb/s speeds. We then dropped a 240GB OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD in both the main drive bay and in the optical bay with a Data Doubler.īoth tests were nearly identical to each other, with read speeds averaging 500MB/s, writes averaging around 475MB/s and those, too remaining consistent over time. For a “pro” machine, this is completely unacceptable. The stock drive returned abysmal results, with write speeds topping out at just over 100MB/s, read speeds around 80MB/s, and both degrading over time. Let’s compare that to the 2012 MacBook Pro with the stock hard drive. The SSD inside the MacBook Pro with Retina Display fared quite well, with reads averaging around 475MB/s or so, writes hitting 370-400MB/s range. Here’s what we saw.įirst, let’s look at Apple’s “flagship” portable, the MacBook Pro with Retina Display click to enlarge So, we ran DiskTester (part of the diglloydTools suite) to gauge performance in a realistic scenario. Since a lot of performance can be tied to the speed of your main internal drive, be it HDD or SSD, benchmarks are certainly in order. Either way, you’d be moving your OS from a slow platter-based drive to a fast SSD like the MacBook Pro with Retina Display has. You could drop a fast SSD into the optical bay with a Data doubler and leave the original drive in there for large, inexpensive storage. We’ve even established that the 2012 MacBook Pro 15” optical bays will support an OWC 6G SSD without any data loss. Replacing the little-used optical drive in your MacBook Pro with an OWC Data Doubler is nothing new. It’s the optical bay, though, that really opens up possibilities. The bay will handle SATA Revision 3.0’s 6Gb/s speeds just dandily.

The hard drive is easily replaced, and replacing it with an OWC 6G SSD is a natural upgrade path for those looking to max out their performance. The real potential here comes, not from the components, but from the space they occupy.

Those two components themselves aren’t particularly great the platter-based hard drive is a dog-slow 5400rpm and nobody seems to use their optical drives any more. Though it’s lacking the thinner profile and high-resolution screen, the 2012 MacBook Pros offer two things that the Retina Display model doesn’t which mean everything to performance: an optical drive and a standard SATA hard drive. While the MacBook Pro with Retina Display has been getting a lot of press around here lately, the real unsung hero of WWDC 2012’s new Macs is the MacBook Pro 15”.

Macbook pro ssd drive strip