Resolved MacBook 5,2 (Mid-2009) SSD Story

[slooksterPSV]

Hello all. I purchase an SSD for one of my computers and put it in my MacBook. It’s a 128Gb drive and I’m using the standard partitioning scheme. It is a difference between day and night. It’s so fast even being limited on SATA that I’m planning on keeping it in my MacBook. I mean 20 sec to boot apps are almost instant for opening etc. I highly recommend getting an SSD for your hardware

 

[bensisko]

I would echo this - I put an SSD in both a 2008 MacBook and a 2010 MacBook Pro and they’re almost like new machines. Highly recommended!

 

[slooksterPSV]

Not much of a story so here I go with more detail. I had the original 120GB drive in the system and my read writes were about 10-12 MB/s I put in a 500GB HDD and the speed went up quite a bit. About 50-70MB/s. Good but not great. Apps still took a long time to load. We’re talking 7-10 bounces. So I would use my Mac in instances of homework light YouTube and light browsing. I put in the SSD, I don’t have hangs no wheels spinning and apps open on the first couple of bounces I can run Xcode without waiting 10 min for it to load and a few seconds between typing. The HDD did kind of tank the performance. The ssd dang I can type move around quick etc. it’s so super fast 128GB is perfect for the machine

 

[EugW]

Heheh. Welcome to 7 years ago, for my 2009 MacBookPro5,5.

Seriously though, the sequential speed isn't the issue here. The issue is the latency.

 

[slooksterPSV]

Heheh. Welcome to 7 years ago, for my 2009 MacBookPro5,5.

Seriously though, the sequential speed isn't the issue here. The issue is the latency.

I always thought most Mac systems had it figured out where the keyboard and typing wasn’t hindered by hard disk activity. Guess I was wrong. That was the biggest issue. Type three words and wait 10 seconds for them to appear. Haha

 

[Retromac2008]

my gf did the same mb 2009 with samsung 250gb.
she said the same

 

[AL1630]

I have a 1TB HD in my early '09, I can't decide whether I'd like more speed or more storage. It seems to be pretty snappy, so I guess if the drive ever slows down or dies I'll put in an SSD.

 

[Jack Neill]

I have 10.13.3 running nicely on my Early 09 MB. 240 SSD 8Gb Ram. If I remember right I bought a PNY SSD to avoid issues with being limited to Sata 1 because of the Sandforce and Nvidia conflict.

 

[Project Alice]

I put an SSHD hybrid drive in my 5,2. I do with I would've gone with an SSD mainly because my windows dual boot is always painfully slow as I don't use it often. But OS X sure does fly!

Also I should mention that I did put a 128gb SSD into an iBook G4. It's an msata in a msata to ide adapter. Its pretty fast too from what it normally would be lol

 

[Jack Neill]

I hated taking those iBooks and PowerBooks apart to change drives..

 

[Project Alice]

I hated taking those iBooks and PowerBooks apart to change drives..

Oh it's absolutely terrible. I spent less time putting the logic board from my 5,2 2009 into a 2008 black MacBook case than I did swapping drives in that G4.