Replacing your old 500GB hard drive with a same-sized SSD from a reputable manufacturer costs only $150, while 1TB drives are under $330, each $100 less than only a couple of years ago. Today, high-capacity SSDs are more affordable than ever. All for much less than the price of a new Mac. Replacing a Mac’s 500GB or 1TB hard drive with a same-sized SSD required at least $250 back then, but the benefits were tremendous: even an aging machine became markedly (5x) faster, silent, and - unexpectedly - more fun to use. Big Sur won't be available as an update so Catalina is the end of the line if that's a factor for you?įorgot to mention, I've updated macOS every year without significant issues, though I've held off Catalina until a couple of weeks ago because it seems to be a little unreliable.When I first wrote about using solid state drives (SSDs) to radically improve the performance of older Macs, high-capacity SSDs were just beginning to become affordable. It's a great machine, hope it keeps going, (as does mine!), for a few more years!įorgot to mention, I've updated macOS every year without significant issues, though I've held off Catalina until a couple of weeks ago because it seems to be a little unreliable. I'd update the SSD before the RAM and see what affect that has. The SSD can easily be reused with an external enclosure if the worst comes to the worst so it's not a wasted investment. Just be aware that you're investing in vintage tech without support from Apple. Overall I'd say if you're not ready to move to a new Mac then an SSD upgrade is well worth the investment. The Macbook Pro is still working as a secondary machine and doesn't crash like it used to now it's not my daily driver. In comparison the Macbook Pro is a little laggy compared to the Macbook Air, but I think the Macbook Air gets hotter and the fans are audible more often. Rebooting fixed the issue but I took that as a hint that we were approaching end of life so I bought a Macbook Air i5 base spec when the 2020 models were released earlier this year.

I started getting issues last year with the Macbook getting hot, and occassionally it crashed, I'd leave it nd come back to find a grey screen with a folder icon with a question mark in it.no hard drive/OS found.

After changing the cable everything has been fine. That made a big difference at the time, I think the SSD was probably the most noticeable change to performance.Īfter changing the SSD I started to get some weird performance problems so I took it to the Apple store where they diagnosed a damaged HDD cable, (as suggested above). I have the base model mid 2012 13' macbook pro, not sure what the original specs were, 2.5GHz cpu and 4Gb RAM perhaps? Maybe 4 years ago I upgraded the RAM to 8Gb and added a 256Gb Crucial SSD.

Ssd macbook air 2012