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SUMMARY:
Easy Install for MacBook Pro 15" Mid-2012, Great Performance, Stable, No Problems, TRIM Support enabled.
DETAIL:
After reading through reviews from multiple sources looking at SSD drives to pair with the newest mid-2012 Apple Macbook Pro computers I ended up choosing the Samsung 830 512-gig drive. It was not the fastest of all the drives, it was not the cheapest of all the drives, but a few things drove me to pick this over some of the others I was considering:
- It seemed from what I read that the reliability has been pretty good with this drive, this is important to me,
- Apple is using the same, or a variant of, the same TM830 controller in their Apple-branded drives, not sure how important this is,
- The need to worry about firmware updates is less as the current firmware has been in place and seems solid for quite a while.
When looking at the Samsung 830 options I was trying to determine if I needed just the drive or the drive with the laptop kit. I chose the drive-only as it turns out the drive will fit as-is into the mid-2012 Macbook Pro without the need for the spacer that comes with the laptop kit. The 7mm refers to the thickness of the drive, the drive is still the same length and width of 9mm drives so it lines up fine and fits well in the Macbook Pro drive bay.
Installation was pretty easy. My Macbook Pro was brand new so I hooked up the Samsung SSD through a firewire->SATA adapter I had laying around. I used Disk Utility to Partition and format the drive. I then used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the drive from the MacBook Pro Hard Disk to the Samsung Solid State Disk. Carbon Copy Cloner will give you the option to install the Recovery Partition if you choose. I used Carbon Copy Cloner, but you can use Super Duper or Mac-based disk cloning software of your choice.
To install the SSD into the Macbook Pro I did the following, wearing a static wristband, using a Torx T6 and a small phillips head screw driver:
- Flipped the Macbook Pro over,
- Removed the 10 screws,
- Popped the bottom off of the computer,
- Unplugged the battery lead from the motherboard,
- Unscrewed the two screws keeping the disk in place,
- Removed the current Hard Drive and Removed the 4 screws bolts in the HDD casing,
- Put those 4 bolts back into the Samsung SSD,
- Placed the Samsung SSD into the drive bay and screwed it back in place,
- Replaced the battery lead to the motherboard,
- Placed the bottom back onto the laptop chassis and screwed it in,
- Turned the laptop back over and booted it up...
Google the following to find a video on replacing the hard drive if you need:
video upgrade/replace hard drive macbook pro 15 mid 2012
This thing is fast. I'm really glad I decided to get the Samsung 830. I've had it a couple of weeks and have had no trouble. The machine boots fast, applications load in a blink, and the machine is very snappy. By the way I added 16-gig of RAM while I had it open. :-)
Now about issues I have read about while researching SSD's for the Mac:
1) Firmware Updates
It seems that various brands of drives required firmware updates. Some firmware updates worked for some people, some didn't, some had to revert to previous firmware for their system to work. I didn't feel like messing with any of that.
I liked that the Samsung has had a fairly stable firmware on their drive and have not required firmware updates in quite a while. To me this means stability. While yes, it is difficult to update the Samsung firmware on a mac (you have to take it out and put it on a windows system) the fact that I don't have to update it in the first place because the firmware has been stable was a big plus for me in my buying decision.
2) TRIM support:
When you put a 3rd party SSD in an Apple machine the Mac OS does not enable TRIM support. You can enable TRIM support after you install the SSD. You can either use Trim Enabler (v2 or better suggested), or you can do it manually by making a modification to a kernel extension so that the TRIM commands generated by the OS can be passed to the drive. The Samsung 830 does to garbage collection so enabling TRIM is not exactly necessary, but benchmarks, tests, and other things I have read lead me to believe that enabling TRIM is the thing to do and should be OK.
Manually modification to Enable TRIM support in Mac OS: GOOGLE: "trim enabler grant"
Application to Enable TRIM support in Mac OS: GOOGLE: "trim enabler groths"
I've had this drive for a couple of weeks so far and I've been running with no problems. I'm glad I got this SSD for my Macbook Pro.
| Hard Drive | 512 GB Solid State Drive |
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