Replacing the HDD with a fast SSD in the Apple MacBook Pro. How I changed the SSD in a MacBook Pro to an inexpensive, but capacious and fast one

If you have a MacBook or iMac with regular HDD (hard drive) and you lack the speed of your MacBook or iMac - our service center knows the solution. We provide installation and replacement services SSD drives on MacBook Air, Pro, Retina, iMac. Advantage of SSD:

• Speed ​​of work. SSD drives provide incomparably higher speed of system operation, in contrast to HDD hard drives. The speed of loading, completing tasks, opening applications will be many times higher when installing an SSD drive.
• Data processing on MacBook and iMac. The copying speed from an SSD is ten times faster than from an HDD. All data will be instantly copied from the SSD drive to external storage media, the copying speed will be limited only by the speed external media.
• SSD replacement speed. Our service center will replace the SSD within an hour; at your request, we can also install Windows on Macbook and iMac. Installation and replacement of SSDs is carried out by highly qualified specialists, you can be confident in the quality of the work.

In what cases is it worth changing the HDD to an SSD drive?

• Works slowly MacBook iMac. If you are not satisfied with the speed of your MacBook, iMac, SSD installation disk will help solve this problem.
• Games and applications on MacBook and iMac slow down. Most often, installing an SSD drive solves this problem. If you have a powerful video card, if you have enough RAM, but games and applications are still slow, an SSD drive will solve this problem.
• The SSD on the MacBook has failed and is broken. Obviously in in this case you need to replace the SSD drive with a new one, our service center will help solve this problem, install the SSD drive on your MacBook iMac and provide a guarantee for all components and work performed to install the drive.

Price list for replacement and installation of SSD on iMac

Price list for replacement and installation of SSD on MacBook Air

Price list for replacement and installation of SSD on MacBook, MacBook Pro,MacBook Unibody

Price list for replacement and installation of SSD on MacBook Pro Retina

Dear customers, the table shows approximate prices, prices are constantly decreasing, please check the exact price with the operator by phone.

More details on faults:

Knowledge base. Ask a question about Apple repair to Mac Pros specialists.

Answer: Good afternoon Ivan. It’s possible, but we’ll be able to say for sure after a free diagnosis. Come, let's see what's wrong with you.

29.02.2016, 18:50

Answer: Good evening Pavel. If out of order SSD drive, repair is not possible, only replacement. You can install a larger SSD. Come to our center, our managers will advise you on the timing and cost of repairs. We will be glad to see you.

Answer: You can boot the system from an external drive, having previously installed Mac OS on it and clean the disk of unnecessary files, the problem with the disk being full will be eliminated.

Answer: The SSD must have a temperature sensor; if there is no sensor, the iMac fans will run at maximum speed. The temperature sensor is only present in original discs from Apple. If you install an SSD instead standard disk, you won’t need anything other than the SSD itself and a standard SSD mount.

In the basic configuration McaBook Pro Apple sets hard disks at 5400 rpm. And their performance with modern operating systems Mac OS X (10.6-10.8) leaves much to be desired. And it’s not for nothing that Apple is gradually but confidently moving to installing everything laptops ssd drives.

We think it's time to make your favorite MacBook even better. You just need to install an SSD drive in it. And so that you are not confused by the limited capacity of the ssd, you can install a second one HDD in place of the DVD drive.

What laptop models is this solution suitable for? — Yes, to almost all MacBooks and MacBook Pros except MacBook Pro Retina

In laptops, a combination of read/write speeds from/to the hard drive at a disk spindle speed of 5400 rpm. does not even reach 50 Mb/sec. A 7200 rpm disk will revive your MacBook almost twice: the read/write speed can fluctuate between 80...105 MB/sec.
It is worth noting that there are also hybrid rigid drives from Seagate, which are designed with a 7200 rpm hard drive with a 16 MB data cache and an 8 GB SSD drive. With such a “combined” drive, the read/write speed can increase by another 5-7% compared to a conventional 7200 rpm drive.

The read/write performance of SSD drives varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and from model to model. In addition, prices for SSD drives have not yet reached a level comparable to conventional ones. hard drives. The price is gradually falling, and even top-end ssds with a capacity of 500 and 960GB are approaching $1 per 1GB of storage.

Since Mac OS X is a very compact operating system, and comes with most necessary programs The total disk space usually does not exceed 30-50GB. You can safely look at an ssd with a capacity of 120GB or more.
Although, in our opinion, it is already worth considering an ssd with a capacity of 180GB or more.

Precisely because the volume of the ssd in combination with its price limits the majority of users in choosing using ssd- We invite you to consider the option high speed ssd and good hdd capacity installed in place of the DVD drive.

For upgrade Apple Mac Book Pro 2011-2012, we will need 3 screwdrivers: torx 6, torx 8 and a Philips 00 or 000 Phillips screwdriver.

Remember! Before disassembling any device, you should remove any residual static electricity from yourself.

On the bottom cover, unscrew 10 screws, 3 of which are longer.

This is what the MacBook Pro 13 looks like from the inside

Before changing anything in the laptop configuration, you MUST disconnect the battery from the motherboard. We don’t want to start a repair with you and replace the system board after a short circuit, do we?

In place of the standard “slow” hard drive install the ssd drive and we can old disk put it in optibay in place of the DVD drive. In our case, we set in Optibey new disk with a capacity of 750GB at 7200 revolutions, in order to increase the speed when accessing user data, which we plan to store on the hdd.

Unscrew the two screws on the plate that holds the hard drive.

We transfer 4 screws (torx 8) around the perimeter of the “old” hard drive to the SSD drive.

We install the ssd in place of the system disk and secure it with a bracket and two screws.

We install the hard drive in the Optibay and be sure to screw it with reverse side two screws.

Remove the optical drive.

We need to disconnect 5 cables.
We do this very carefully.

Disable

• hard drive cable
• optical drive cable
• WiFi cable
• camera cable
• speaker cable

Unscrew the speaker and disconnect the antennas from Wi-Fi module and put the speaker aside.

DVD superdrive. Unscrew the three screws and pull it out.

We rearrange the data cable and mounting bracket from the DVD drive to optibay, observing the installation direction of the bracket.

We install optibay with a hard drive in place of the DVD drive.

We reinstall the plastic speaker bar and connect the antennas to the Wi-Fi module.

We connect the cables and cables in reverse order to system board. And connect the battery.

Close and screw the bottom cover.
Installing the system from an external boot drive or through the system Mac recovery OS X via the Internet (using the Cmd+R combination when booting the computer).

Now, at the owner's disposal, very fast Apple MacBook Pro 2011: the system itself and all programs launch several times faster than with a standard hdd. The system responds instantly. With a significant amount open applications There is no freezing or freezing of the “spinning colored candy”. Programs that use caching of working data work with large files without any delay. And when processing very large amounts of information, the execution time was reduced (according to the laptop owner) by 2-3 times.
It is worth noting once again that the hard drive is limited by the physical ability to read/write to spinning metal plates. Therefore its throughput» does not exceed 115 Megabytes/sec. (V best case scenario). There are no mechanical elements in the ssd, so the read/write speed on the ssd can reach 550 megabytes/sec. There is an option to theoretically increase this value to 1.2 Gigabytes/sec., but for this you need to use an external hardware RAID array that is NOT system disk, connected at best via a Thunderbolt bus of 10 Gigabit/s (or 1.25 Gigabytes/s) and exchanging data with another similar RAID array via the same Thunderbolt bus.
If you are an Apple owner Mac Pro— you can install four or more SSD drives, make a large RAID array (but keep in mind that it will not be hardware, but software, if you do not use a special RAID controller). And even in this case, you can achieve theoretical data transfer rates of up to 750 Megabytes/sec (which corresponds to a data transfer speed of 6 Gigabit/sec on the sata bus).

In the next article we will tell you how to do it yourself Fusion Drive on Apple laptop with two or more hard drives installed. And how, in our practical opinion, does Fusion Drive differ from the operation of a conventional SSD+HDD combination.

The article was prepared based on the results repair work MacFix Service Center.

The cost of installing an SSD on a MacBook in our service center

Today I would like to tell you about my personal experience installations solid state hard drive, also called SSD. The point of installing such a disk is very big: the system literally starts working much faster. You can find out which drive I chose for myself, how I installed it, and whether I was impressed by reading this article.

The article was actually written by the administration of OA 3, and was not taken from any third party resource. It all started when I noticed how my Mac started to slow down a little. This fact I was amazed, because I bought a computer in March 2013, we can say that this is completely new car. Without thinking twice, I decided to upgrade my computer. It was immediately clear that an SSD and an increased amount of RAM could give me a performance boost.

The RAM in the MacBook Pro 13’ 2012 without retina, which is exactly what I have, can be increased to 8 GB, at least that’s what it says on the Apple website. But it turns out that the well-known company Corsair produces special RAM that works great with computers like mine, and its volume is 16 GB. RAM must have following characteristics DDR 3 SO-DIMM 204 pins. But I did not increase the amount of RAM, since most experts advised me to choose an SSD drive.

SSD selection.

Certainly, RAM will give an increase in performance, but not as big as an SSD drive. The place to start when choosing a disk is the format. You can find the disk in Yandex.Market. Choose a 2.5-inch SSD drive for laptops.

Next let's move on to volume hard memory disk. The size of the SSD drive will no longer affect performance, so analyze how much memory is currently occupied on your Mac and select suitable model hard drive.

On my HDD disk there were 500 GB, of which I only took 45, so I realized that a 120GB SSD would be more than enough for me, and I was not mistaken.

Which hard drive is better?

Let's start with the company. I advise you to consider Plextor, OZI Vertex, Intel, Samsung, Corsair, and Transcend - I chose the drive from this company for myself.

Which hard drive is more powerful?

There are three main factors to consider here.

Write speed - Read speed - Speed random recording(4Kb blocks).

For me these figures reach numbers of (520-550-82000).

In principle, this is where we can finish telling what a hard drive should be like.

Installing an SSD in Mac.

How to install a hard drive. I’ll say right away that I’ve never taken apart my Mac, and I never thought about it until I saw how much they were asking for. service centers behind replacement of hard disk. So I armed myself with screwdrivers and started disassembling my Mac. I did this according to instructions from IFIXIT.COM, which I recommend to everyone.

To begin, I opened the lid of my laptop, disconnected the battery, and removed the hard drive. Up to this point everything was going very smoothly, but then I ran into a problem. Co old tough disk, you need to remove the bolts, and I didn’t have the appropriate screwdriver, so I took pliers, carefully wrapped their jaws with a cloth so as not to damage the bolts, and got to work.

Fortunately, everything went well and within five minutes these bolts were sitting on the new SSD drive. Naturally, we then do everything in reverse order and install the new disk in the place where the old one was.

Installing OS X on an SSD.

That’s it, the SSD drive is there, but it’s empty, how can we install the system there? There are several ways to do this very simply.

1) You can create a full backup of your system in Time Machine, to do this, open Time Machine on your Mac and connect an empty external hard disk. Then the program will do everything

2) The second method will prompt you to create bootable USB flash drive, or boot disk. This is the method I wanted to use, but in the end Mac didn’t see the flash drive, and I had to use the third method.

3) Finally, the third method that I used. When you turn on a Mac with an empty SSD, you can connect to your WiFi networks and your computer will download and install the OS from the Internet, which is very cool and convenient.

What to do with HDD?

Where to put the HDD that was taken out of the Mac? You can install it directly on your Mac using Optibay. That is, you replace your DVD drive hard drive, and eventually your Mac will have a large number of HDD+SSD memory, it turns out a kind of Fusion Drive. But this option did not suit me. I decided to make my ex HDD external hard drive, having bought a box for it, which cost me 300 rubles.

The box is a box that looks like an external hard drive, only it opens and the HDD is inserted into it. Very convenient, and now this disk can always be with me.

Impression.

I'm amazed at what happened to my computer. Now it turns on in 12 seconds, instead of the usual 55 seconds; after turning it on, you can immediately start working on it, launching “heavy” programs. I haven’t encountered any brakes since installing the SSD, but professional programs, such as Photoshop CS 5 Extended open in 2 seconds. All standard applications They open instantly. The computer runs silently and does not heat up at all, although before this it worked quietly.

Himself hard the disk cost 3,800 rubles for me, which is not that much money. Therefore, I strongly recommend that anyone who is not satisfied with the speed of their Macintosh perform this procedure.

Online store of spare parts and tools for Apple.
Today we will tell you how to save money by upgrading the SSD drive of all Mac computers after 2013. As you know, OWC has released new drives with a capacity of up to 1 TB with a PCIe interface and a proprietary Apple connector. Disk speeds for this protocol are not great: up to 763 MB/s reading and 446 MB/s writing, but PCIe 2.0 allows you to achieve much higher speeds. And the price for 480GB is almost 30,000 rubles with delivery from the USA, and in Moscow from 44,000 rubles.

Most recently, Kingston released PCIe 2.0 SSD drives with an M.2 connector. Food is the same as Mac computers, but the connector is different. The task was set, the drawings were drawn, months of waiting and required adapter already in our office. All that remains is to install the disk through the adapter and carry out testing.

Brief installation instructions SSD Kingston M.2 in MacBook Retina 13" 2015.

Step 1
- unscrew 10 Pentalobe screws *1.2 with a screwdriver
- please note that the screws differ in shape and length, during the assembly process return everything to its place

Step 2
- remove the plastic cover from the battery connector

Step 3
- disconnect the battery cable from the motherboard with a spatula

Step 4
- now that motherboard de-energized, unscrew the T5 screw that secures the standard SSD drive

Step 5
- carefully remove the SSD at a slight angle

Step 6
- prepare a new larger SSD with an adapter and insert it into the connector, it fits perfectly

Step 7
- install our disk with the adapter and assemble the laptop in reverse order

Step 8
- install clean OS X from a flash drive and test the new disk

After installing the operating system, we pass the BlackMagic Disk Speed ​​Test. Windows results in the screenshot. The write speed at some points reached 561Mb/sec, and the read speed over 1Gb/sec. What did all this give us? New SSD 256Gb disk for Mac devices PCIe last generations costs from 25,000 rubles, and it will be a disk without any warranty, since Apple does not sell such disks, it will be a disassembled or used disk. We, using a magic adapter, installed a Kingston SHPM2280P2/240G 240GB drive (price on Yandex Market at the date of publication from 11,730 rubles). Total savings of over 10,000 rubles, taking into account the cost of the adapter, as well as a 3-year manufacturer’s warranty on the SSD drive.

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If you have already changed the HDD, that is regular hard drive, your MacBook on an SSD, that is, on a solid-state drive (and you did it), then it would be superfluous to tell how much faster the laptop becomes after such an upgrade.

However, as it turned out, even in such a not at all complicated upgrade, you can do things wrong if you don’t have the proper experience. In this regard, about one mistake that the author of this post At first he managed to do it, but then had to fix it when he decided to change the HHD to an SSD in his work MacBook. By the way, regarding questions Apple repair in Kyiv, this link will tell you and help you.

In general, the essence of the fable is that the operating room Mac system OS, as opposed to Windows, for newly installed solid state drives TRIM command does not turn on automatically. However, if your MacBook was originally equipped with an SSD, then when you replace it (for example, with a larger drive), TRIM will already be enabled by default.

What is TRIM? In short, TRIM is special team, which is sent by drivers when any file is deleted file system SSD disk controller. Having received this command, the controller “understands” which data stored on the SSD is no longer needed and background clears them, freeing memory blocks for new data. This is one of the specific features flash memory. And in this way the data is in blocks SSD memory are rewritten at approximately the same speed as on HDDs, in which data is rewritten according to a different principle (new ones are written “on top” of old ones without preliminary cleaning).

Another thing is that not all operating systems support the TRIM command. And, as in my case, the user finds out about this after the disk replacement has begun and after an “unclear problem” has arisen.

Therefore, if you are planning a similar event, I recommend that you first check whether this same TRIM team works there.

You can do this as follows:

• click the Apple icon (in the left top corner screen) and in the menu click “ About this Mac «;
• In the next window, click the button “ System report «;
• in the left part of the window that opens, find and click “ Hardware " and then in the list - " SATA/SATA Express «;
• now let's scroll right side up to the line " TRIM support «;
• if we see nearby " Yes", it means the command is enabled if it says " No“, then TRIM must be enabled separately.

How to enable TRIM on MacBook:

First, let’s double-check that you are logged into your laptop with administrator rights. After that:

• launch Terminal (you can simply find it through Spotlight);
• recruiting a team sudo trimforce enable and click Enter ;
• enter password that account, which is on this moment used, and press Enter ;
• the system will ask you to confirm your actions, read the request, write y and press again Enter ;
• now the system will ask for permission to reboot - write again y and click Enter .

After this, all that remains is to wait until the laptop reboots, and you can consider the job done. But for the sake of order it’s better to go to “ System report" and check if TRIM is working. And then you can change the disk. About the features of component replacement and repair Apple technology, in particular Macbooks, iPads and iPhones of any model and year of manufacture, more details here - http://wefixit.com.ua/remont-iphone.