Upgrading my Mac

If you have the funds by all means upgrade both RAM and SSD.

You can get everything you need at OWC. Their link will tell if SATAll or SATAlll for details.

They guarantee their SSD for 3 and 5 yrs depending on what you buy.

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2012), OS X El Capitan(10.11.3), i7 480GB SSD 16GB RAM iPhone5 iOS9.2.1, Parallels10.0.2

I owned the 13” model of the same computer you have. Several years ago I upgraded the RAM from 4 to 8GB and still unsatisfied replaced the drive with an SSD. Having done that my 2009 MBA actually seemed to perform better than my wife’s 2011 MBA in some respects which I figured was due to the extra RAM, hers having only 4GB. Curious, I returned the original RAM and tested a bit more. The extra RAM did have a positive impact on performance but actually not as much as I’d have expected. That’s a long winded way to say upgrade to an SSD for sure. If you can afford the RAM too, go for that as well.

I used to recommend three SSD models based on price, performance, and ease of use but Samsung has been removed from my list due to reports of problems that have cropped up on the internet (and I experienced personally) and conflicting answers from Samsung tech support and documentation. So today I recommend Crucial and OWC drives. I have both in my menagerie of computers. Theoretically an SSD should last much longer than a mechanical hard drive. Practically I can say that I own two SSDs that are 4 years old and if they are slower than when I bought them the difference is so slight I cannot notice it.

You can use cloning software to transfer everything from the internal drive to the SSD (assuming the SSD is large enough). You can also use TimeMachine to restore everything to the new drive. I have a drive dock (it is like an external enclosure except it is easy to pull one drive out and put another in) and I always prepare the new drive and test boot it before installing it. Either way all your software will work but you will have to re-enter serial numbers for some of the programs. If you have any software that uses an activation scheme deactivate them before you do the clone.

neran21 wrote:

Lastly, for those that have been using an SSD how long do they usually last

Do your own research, but I would highly recommend enabling TRIM on your new SSD—which will make it last longer.

The advantage of the TRIM command is that it enables the SSD’s Garbage Collection to skip the invalid data rather than moving it, thus saving time not rewriting the invalid data. This results in a reduction of the number of erase cycles on the flash memory and enables higher performance during writes. The SSD doesn’t need to immediately delete or garbage collect these locations it just marks them as no longer valid.

ref: http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz/garbage-collection-and-trim-i n-ssds-explained-an-ssd-primer/

Simple enough to do after you have it up and running, from the command line in terminal, copy and paste:

trimforce enable

MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2012), OS X El Capitan(10.11.3), i7 480GB SSD 16GB RAM iPhone5 iOS9.2.1, Parallels10.0.2