Upgrade early 2011 MacBook Pro

Hello,

I had a 2011 MBP and upgraded to SSD years ago (750GB to 960GB) and doubled the RAM (8GB to 16GB) and a huge difference. At the time, there was no Apple option, so I bought from a company named Crucial.

You could check Activity Monitor to try to see where you are slow. Or is what you are running more disk or memory intensive?

I would start with an SSD, and confirm specs with whomever you buy it from, so you don't over buy. The new SSDs are a lot faster now, but may not be compatible -- just double check.

My 2011 died, due to the known video issue, so I upgraded to the 2018 MBP -- very nice machine. But I took my old SSD out of the 2011 and bought an enclosure for it (<$20), so now it is an external hard drive for extra storage.

Lastly and more importantly (might be a cheap fix), read through posts and look for booting options to clear NVRAM and options for clearing the SMC -- that helped me a few times. Also read about checking the drives health with Disk Utility, but I think you want to do it from booting into a special mode (single user mode or diagnostic mode), not from a regular boot and login. These may actually fix your problems. I've had disk corruption in the past and doing these can trigger internal rebuilds of tables in the disk to help optimize and fix any issues -- this worked a couple times for me {when I was freaking out that the system was slow}.

Good luck

I had the same experience.

MacBook Pro 2011 15".

Used Crucial SSD and upgraded the RAM.

It made a dramatic difference and for a while everything was good.

However a year or so later something else seemed to stop it from working so I had to invest in a new one.

Having done this quite a few more times now on iMacs and Mac minis I would say that replacing the SSD is probably the most effective thing you can do. upgrading the RAM is OK but probably not essential.

The reason your computer is going slow with lots of Wheel of death downtime is down to the read/write speed of the current hard drive being too slow to run subsequent macOS versions.

An SSD will have much better read/write speeds.

It is also actually quite straight forward to remove the screws on the base of the MBP.

Crucial do have a "how to video" on their site for your model which you can type in.

Good luck too.

If you are running 10.11 El Capitan or later with less than 6Gb of real RAM, you are stuck in a Performance Rut, simulating the needed additional RAM on your boot drive, which is far too slow for reasonably-responsive performance.

By far the biggest payback is to get above 6GB of RAM for ordinary use, and much higher for high-performance uses such as Photo or Video editing. Additional increments above that level help some, but show a diminishing return.

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Readers who have enough RAM who then install a low latency SSD drive report, "It's like getting a whole new computer!"

But doing this seemingly simple operation has a problem. The complexity is so high, that if anything goes wrong, it is impossible to find and fix the issues that may arise.

Readers recommend that you also find an external enclosure, adapter, or "toaster" drive holder, and install your new drive there, get it completely ready for use in the external. Then when you go to transplant, you have a "Known-good" drive and software, and any issue have to do with the transplant and nothing else.

2009 through 2012 MacBook pro 13-n models are especially hard on internal drive cables, and you may need a new drive cable as well.

That's good advice.

when swapping out hard disks for SSDs on iMacs and Mac minis I will always completely configure the new SSD bore installing in the computer.

• a SATA cable is very helpful here or and enclosure.
• you can format the disk first and then install macOS onto it.
• Then boot up from the new SSD to make sure that it will boot.

Once ou have successfully booted up from it you can have (more) confidence that it will boot up when it is installed.

You should be able to get High Sierra without issue. High Sierra and Sierra are is still getting security updates at this writing.

Mojave support for the Graphics chips used in 2011 MacBook Pro is not available, so Apple will not allow Mojave to be installed.

billverkaik--

I suggest you not just assure it will boot, but go much farther.

Continue along the setup path and Import your User data and get that incoming drive set up EXACTLY the way you want it. Make sure everything is to your liking. Get the list of additional things you need to do to the incoming drive down to Zero.

Then when you do the surgery, any unwanted side effects are directly attributable to the surgery, and nothing else.

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My reference to a cable in this instance are to the INTERNAL cable inside the computer. In the models mentioned, that cable take a turn that is sharper than it should be, and has a tendency to put too much stress on the conductors and cause micro-fractures. In addition, the insulation is allowed to scrub against the machined inner surface of the aluminum housing, sometimes causing minute short circuits, that may work fine for the old drive, but cause a problem for the new, faster drive.

Finding problems like this can drive you crazy. That is why it is worth the trouble to do all you can in the External enclosure first.

You should check with Apple first.

I have looked and it says mid 2012 or later.

see the link below:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201475