2011 Macbook Pro Hard Drive Upgrade?

Actually the 2011 models all support 6.0 Gb/s SATA interfaces. Any notebook sized SATA drive that fits your needs should work. Obviously, drives that support 6.0 Gb/s will be faster than one supporting only 3.0 Gb/s.

There are no 2.5" sata III (6.0Gb/s) drives that fit the MBP.

All 2.5" sata drives are 3.0Gb/s. The HD mechanism does not max out the sata II (3Gb/s) interface, so, nothing to be gain from a 6Gb/s HD drive.

I would look at either the Seagate Momentus or Western Digital Scorpio Black 7200rpm drives.

SSD, however, is another story and will be able to use the faster sata III inferface (6Gb/s), with drives reaching 500MB/s write/read speeds.

I would reccomend gettin an SSD if your not using your current drive for data storage.... If you need the speed and or are using your current drive as a scratch disk for photo or video editing, an SSD will make a world of difference! You can also, expect to get alot of benefit from your Sata 6 connection speeds. Check out the OCZ Vertex 3 or the Intel 510! They're both pretty fast, altough the Intel drives are more about realiability then speed... Once you try an SSD, you'll never go back to HDD for your boot drives.... Have fun!! Also, what is your budget?

But in my Honest opinion I don't think you'll really notice the difference between the 5400 and 7200 rpm unless your rendering large video files or transfering large amounts of data to an external or USB drive. But again you'll be limited on the speed of the external connections that your transferring too... If you really want to notice a difference, get the SSD with a Sata 3 or 6.0GBs connection speed. But the difference between a 5400 and 7200 rpm drive for normal tasks is almost negligable, you probably won't even notice the difference, but if you get the SSD you'll definately notice a difference in boot time, transfer speed, video rendering speed, copying speed of large files, etc...

Would the SAMSUNG 850 PRO 2.5" 512GB SATA III 3-D Vertical Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-7KE512BW be compatible with a macbook pro 2011 version?