Has anyone installed Crucial M500 960GB SSD in a 2011 MBP?

Thanks, that's exactly the type of feedback i needed! Thumbs UP !!! 🙂

Follow Up: the Crucial SSD has arrived, and is now installed in the main bay of my 17" MBP Late 2011. It is working very well, it is approximtaley 2.5 time faster than the original SATA-2 SSD, which has now been moved in the optical bay.

I still prefer to leave this unit as the system disk (I suppose that it is more reliable, for now).

Indeed I am very happy, my system is now flying, 1.2 Tb of storage, all SSD !!! And 16 Gb RAM...

Even if it is 2-years old, I do not think you can find a faster laptop, with such a nice antiglare 17" display nowadays, and capable of running both Windows 7 64 Pro and OSX Mountain Lion...

If only I could install a second Crucial M500 in the Optical bay, I would have a 2TB-sysem in raid-0...

But this is unlickely to happen, the optical bay cable is not good enough for SATA-3...

On the other hand, there is little chance that either Crucial or Samsung release a cost-effectiv 1Tb SATA2 SSD. And these are substantialy the only two contenders in the market capable of relasing cost-effective 1Tb SSDs...

So I suppose that my system is now at its maximum possible confguration ad performance, I hope it will last until something similar appears again on the market.

Currently if the laptop is stolen or crashed, it would be very difficult to replace: Apple does not produce anymore 17-inch laptops, nor anti-glare displays...

The Retina models have significant problems for my usage (small display, glossy, not-native resolution operation under OSX, just one SSD not user-replaceable, no Firewire port, no Ethernet port, no Exresscard slot, no expandable RAM).

I think that the history of Mac laptops was like a parabolic curve, and the maximum was hit with my one. After this, the only significant improvement was the USB3, which indeed I also have thanks to a 20-USD expresscard. In the meanwhile, so many good features have been removed...

It is good that these new excellent 1Tb SSD units can now be emloyed for revamping the 2011 models, extending for another couple of years their work life.

But it is bad that Apple does not recognize the need of these professional machines by power users like me.

angeloffarina

thanks for your follow up, This is the set up i'm going for. with the stock 7200 hdd in the opti bay and m500 960 in main bay

I agree that I think that the macbook pro are lika a parabolic curve and this is definitly the hight of the macbook pro

was originally thinking of replacing the mac all together but the lack of 17" models is disappointing.

I think the ssd vs 16gb ram is a perfect upgrade to give the 2011 macbook pros a new lease of life

Sam

apple seem to be aiming for the fashion concience audience with the new macbooks and now only way to get power is with the actual macpro, again making upgrades difficult

its a shame that hardcore mac fans and genuine power users are losing out to users that want to flash some cash or make a statement. thanks to the popularity of the iPhones :-(

I have the M4 Crucial 256 gb in my 2011 MBP and i must say it performs great even after a little over a year. The GC works great. No trim needed. With SSD's running garbage collection, I was told to let your mac run overnight once a month with the user logged off so the garbage collection could really perform its magic in idle mode. I highly recommend Crucial.

I have successfull installed this crucial M500 960 GB. The original APPLE SSD TS512C is moved to the optical bay drive, using a alluminium frame called "data-doubler" from OWC. Also installed 16GB RAM. Installed crucial M500 since 3 weeks without problems.

Negotiated Link Speed 6 Gigabit for the cricial SSD, and 3 Gb for Apple SSD.

Together with the data-doubler I orderred an OWC 480 GB 3G SSD, but this drive spontanous ejected if I copied large amount of data onto it (virtual machine images, >60GB). After many mails have returned this drive to vendor in the United States of A. by RMA.

MacBookPro8,3 A1297

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro8,3

Processor Name: Intel Core i7

Processor Speed: 2,2 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 4

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 6 MB

Memory: 16 GB

Boot ROM Version: MBP81.0047.B27

SMC Version (system): 1.70f6

dr_grebber, I see that also for you the M500 is working flawless in the main bay. However, I have two questions for you:

- are you still using, like me, the original SATA2 SSD as system disk in the optical bay, or did you transfer your operating system to the new M500? I did not dare yet to transfer the OS, so it would be nice to know if you did...

- where did you install the OWC 480Gb SSD? Was it in the main bay or inside the data doubler? I wonder if these Crucial SSD have superior shielding, as in the past I attempted to install a Corsair SATA3 SSD in the main bay (where SATA3-operation is theoretically possible), but it was not working reliably. And instead these new Crucial M500 units seem to work perfectly...

Initially I tried the OWC 480GB SSD in the optical drive bay, but as it ejected every time, OWC-support suggested to replace the esata cable. As this cable was difficiult to buy in Europe, I swapped the two drives locations. With the original (boot) SSD at optical bay and the OWC in the original bay the problem with ejecting OWC SSD persists, and OWC-support agreed that there must be something wrong with their SSD do I returned it by RMA. As I lost confidence in OWC, I decided to try the Crucial 960 SSD (cheaper and bigger and faster!).
So at the moment, the original Apple (toshiba) bootable SSD is inside the data doubler in the optical bay, and the Crucial M500 is mounted in the original HD bay.

Finally I followed the tips from

http://sysadmin.flakshack.com/post/9253439680/ssd-tweaks-for-mac-os-x and installed TRIM Enabler ( http://www.groths.org/software/ )

Substantially your story is identical to my one....

And the final state of our computers is identical, too, so I suppose that I will leave it as it is now: original SATA2-SSD in the optical bay, running the operating system, and a fast 960Gb Crucial M500 as data-only disk in the main bay...

There is a lesson here, indeed. The Crucial M500 has a very good SATA3 interface, capable of dealing with the imperfect shielding of the SATA cables in our Macbook Pros... Other SSD makers have worst interfaces, which cause any sort of problems. I can also report that a technician at OWC recommended me to purchase the Crucial M500, and I followed their advice...

Order put in today for the 960gb m500

Gonna install in main bay with fresh install and use current stock hdd in optibay

Gonna disable hibernate and hdd motion sensor but still in two minds about trim

I know the m500 has built in garbage collection which although different from trim should be more than adequate for the job

I have read so much conflicting info regarding non stock ssd's used in MacBooks with trim enabled

What are u guys using ?

Thanks

Sam

I did enable TRIM for my M500 installed in the main bay with a couple of commands in the Terminal window:

https://gist.github.com/return1/4058659

Using Trim Enabler on my Crucial m4 series 512GB and have has trim enabled since I purchased the SSD in April of 2012 (yes, it's that old!).

I'm hearing really good things about the M500 series and the 960GB in particular. If you go to the Crucial community website you'll find that most people are keeping trim enabled on MacBook Pros, using either Trim Enabler or Chameleon.

Good luck,

Clinton

Thanks for the quick response guess it won't hurt enabling TRIM

Had read as apple doesn't officially support TRIM On non apple ssd's that the trim third party software may not work as expected as the software is spoofing OS X to accept any ssd as an apple branded one

Guess this is the same with the trim-enabler.sh script?

Guess OS X doesn't have a piece for software for testing TRIM other than about this mac says if it's enabled or not

Angelofarina are you using mavericks

Correct - the System Information will show that you're using a Solid State drive and whether trim is enabled or not.

In the past, you had to re-enable trim after each .1 update to OS X. I haven't found that to be the case with Mavericks, however that could always change!

Trim is always on for Apple SSDs and flash storage devices. And it's actually used when enabled.

I recommend using one of the apps that I mentioned to enable trim instead of going through the Terminal commands.

Clinton

I am not on Maverick yet, I wait to upgrade, because I run some software written here at the University that has not yet been tested under Maverick...

My 17" MBP is actually with Mountain Lion 10.8.5.

I prefer a Terminal command to an "unofficial" package for enabling TRIM. I like to have control over the software running on my machine...

As my Crucial M500 is brand new, I did not notice any improvement in speed after enabling trim. However, this should be relevant on the long run, not just after installation...