Mac SSD Upgrade Experience
 

So after getting tired of hearing my Macbook HD click and clack and make me nervous it was about to fail, I found some very good pricing on the Crucial MX100 512GB SSD and decided to take the plunge. The process was fairly simple, so here is what I did in case anyone is considering the upgrade:

1. bought the SSD, tiny screwdriver with torq pieces, and external USB disk caddy to host the SSD temporarily

2. put the SSD into the caddy, connected it to the Mac, allowed it initialize and did a format using the Mac extended journal

3. using Carbon Copy Cloner, I cloned the old drive to the SSD, then rebooted and did a refresh clone to catch any missed files, then using the Option key, booted to the external SSD to make sure it was ready

4. the physical swap was easy - lots of online tutorials and videos are available and it took me under 10 minutes

5. after the swap, booted normally although the boot time was not any faster with the SSD (my Macbook was never a fast boot) - but file access and overall performance seems much faster.

The only casualty from the exchange was Google Drive - the app can't seem to find and link to the local folder, although it's still there on the system - I guess I can log out and back in to reset the connection.

The MX100 series seems to have some very solid reviews, and offers a price point much lower than similar SSDs. Outside of the cloning process, I don't think the entire swap took more than 30 minutes and I'm far from a techie person.

The Crucial MX100 (128GB-512GB, about $.40 per GB) is one of the cheapest drives on the market because it isn't very good. Crucial has a poor reputation due to buggy drives, mediocre reliability, and not honoring their warranty, but this drive is rather mature so they might finally have it figured out. Not a good choice for OSX due to poor performance consistency. This is a low-endurance drive with a 3 year warranty, or 72 TB of writes, whichever comes first.

You should've bought a Samsung Evo series drive intead.

hmm, the online reviews across different sites seemed pretty consistent in their praise for the MX100 in terms of performance and reliability. There is another Crucial SSD series that did not get great reviews, but it was a little more expensive.

As someone who has both brands in use, I'm not sure I agree. The MX100 had some firmware issues at launch, but is currently one of the highest rated drives out there. Performance isn't much of an issue if you ask me since it is going in a machine that already had a 7mm drive, so wasn't using the latest and greatest in interfacing like machines with an existing PCI based drive.

Also, your Samsung EVO also only has 3 year warranty. You'll need a PRO to get 5 years (with 73TB limit) or pay through the nose for an 850 PRO for ten year warranty.

It was recently known that Crucial outright lied about the power-loss features promised on their consumer drives. You can read about it here http://www.anandtech.com/show/8528/m...da-placeholder.

No good faith attempt was made to correct this, instead they doubled down and lied again. The point about the length of warranty is really moot in light of this.

No it isn't.

The overblown marketing hype about their power saving feature isn't even on the drive the OP posted about so it has no relevance to the product installed in his Mac.

We're discussing the MX100, which from my experience (and that of most reviews online) is a rock solid drive. You said it sucks and criticized its warranty, which is the same as the alternative you presented.

Bottom line; the MX100 is a fine drive, excellent value for money and the OP has nothing to worry about.

Curious.....how's your MX100 SSD doing after 1 year? I'm thinking of adding to my late 2008 aluminum MB - but with install in optical bay rather than replacing my HD.

Also, would you know the differences btw MX100 and MX200 series - I see the latter come up in searching for compatible SSD for late 2008 aluminum MB?

Mac SSD Upgrade Experience
 

MX100 in my wife's computer for about 1.5 yrs. recently took it out and put a higher capacity drive in. No problems at all. Old drive is now in my sisters old MacBook chugging along quite fine.

Fdw