Bought this drive to replace the Hitachi HDD in my daughter's old Macbook Pro (15-inch, mid-2009), after having bought and installed the Samsung equivalent SSD in my personal laptop (Toshiba Satellite A665, running Windows 7). The Samsung SSD's are a bit more expensive, because they're built with components that are rated to outlast their closest competitors by about 2 to 1; I wanted the more durable drive for that computer, and my daughter's old Macbook will now be a "backup" device, so total lifespan of the SSD is not as important there.
I already reviewed the Samsung drive, and the main reason I'm separately reviewing this one is to assure potential buyers that this drive (and probably all the others now quickly emerging from, e.g., Samsung, Crucial, Toshiba, etc.) WILL work with Macs. However, since Apple does not provide any kind of cloning or optimization support for replacement of "their" drives with third-party alternatives, you just have to follow a bit more cumbersome procedure for putting a third-party SSD like this one into your Mac. First, you'll need a SATA-to-USB connector (I got the Star-Tech one -- worked fine) to connect the bare SSD to a USB port, and your Mac has to be functioning so that you can re-format the SSD using the Mac's "disk utility" feature. Once you've formatted the SSD so that your Mac can "see" and use it, then you'll need to download a third-party cloning software to copy all of the data from your existing HDD to the SSD. I used "Carbon Copy Cloner," which worked great, and produced a perfectly functioning clone of the original HDD, with no boot errors or other problems.
Assuming you have no problems swapping out the drives and booting up from the SSD, the last piece of the puzzle is "optimization" ... that is, a program similar to Samsung's "Magician" software, which helps your computer work more efficiently with its new SSD; minimize unnecessary data transfers from/to the drive (e.g., excessive reading/writing from/to the flash memory will shorten the lifespan of the drive), and provide some monitoring and diagnostic tools to measure the performance and "health" of the SSD over time. I obviously don't know, but suspect that many of the sudden failures of these drives reported by a few users in some recent reviews were caused by the users' failure to address "optimization" when they first installed the SSD. If some attention isn't given to this, the drive WILL still work, but it will probably run a bit slower than it should, and be more vulnerable to failure. It's my (admittedly limited) understanding that most recent Windows OS's (e.g., 7, 8, 10), all have some kind of SSD optimization features built into them, and that programs like "Magician" simply provide a few additional tools and a "dashboard view" interface, as an alternative/addition to whatever tools are already present in the Windows OS.
Apple, on the other hand, provides no such native support for non-Apple replacements of *their* drives, so you have to get this assistance elsewhere. Good news is, that help isn't hard to find, or to use. "Chameleon SSD Optimizer," for example, is free and reputedly works with a large cross-section of the most popular/widespread Mac OS X variants. I opted for "Trim Enabler" from Cindori Software, at a cost of $10, which gave me all the tools I was interested in, and which, once downloaded and installed, all worked fine with this SSD and the Macbook Pro described above, running OS X.9.5 ("Mavericks").
Following the procedures outlined above, I cloned over 300GB onto this SanDisk drive from the Mac's original HDD, and so far, the new SSD is working flawlessly in this Macbook Pro. It has dramatically decreased startup and shutdown times, and sped up every function that requires reading/writing data from/to the drive ... no more "spinning beachballs." The computer is once again a real pleasure to use.
I'll come back and edit this review if I run into any problems, but so far, none to report. This drive deserves every one of its five stars ...
| Hard Drive | 480 GB 1x480GB |
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