Which Mac Models Can Be Internally Upgraded? Not all SSDs are equivalent in reliability and performance, but ones from top-tier chip companies are pretty incredible. Running cooler, quieter, and with superior energy efficiency than traditional hard drives, SSDs have fewer failures, and reputable manufacturers tend to warranty them for longer than their predecessors.įor instance, Samsung’s consumer drives generally have 5-year warranties, and if you’re willing to pay more, its PRO series drives have 10-year warranties, eclipsing all but the most expensive enterprise-class desktop hard disks. Nine years later, dramatically faster and smaller SSDs with the same capacities can be had for less than a tenth of those prices, so every current Mac either has an SSD by default or as an option. The January 2008-vintage original MacBook Air was the first Mac with the option of a 64GB SSD (for a $1,300 premium over the laptop’s base price), and 1TB SSDs were going for roughly $4,000 - Apple didn’t even try to sell 1TB SSDs at that point. A Mac that once took over a minute to boot can now start working in seconds Macs built with SSDs can awaken from sleep instantly.ĭespite superior performance, high prices led Apple to slowly stagger solid state drive adoption across individual Mac product lines. Even without changing a Mac’s CPU, GPU, or RAM, replacing the hard drive with an internal SSD instantly leads to much faster macOS performance, app loading, restarting, and file accessing. So this is a perfect time to revisit the topic of SSD upgrades if you held out before, now’s the time to jump in!įor nearly a decade, SSDs have been acknowledged as the “future” of Mac storage. With this week’s release of macOS High Sierra, Apple has officially made SSDs its preferred Mac storage solution, introducing the new APFS standard to further optimize SSD performance over Fusion and traditional hard drives. Once unthinkably huge 2TB and 4TB SSDs are now commonly available, too, albeit at eye-watering prices. 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. 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.

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