On the SSD pricing side, while it’s true you can get a 1TB SSD for about $110, that’s the price for super cheap SSD - higher quality (longer life and faster) SSDs are still $250-$300 per TB. So Apple’s price of $400/TB is not that out of line now.
If the laptop drive is easy to access, I’d suggest you replace the internal drive with an SSD so it it not limited to USB2 connections. More than likely if you have a laptop that does not have USB3, it will be a SATA drive connection and easily cloned and replaced (if access is not too difficult). And yes, the difference is incredible, especially if the drive was 5400rpm.
OTOH, if the machine is old enough to not have USB3, then it may be better to just replace it. Even my 2012 Macbook Pro had USB3 (and Thunderbolt v1).
[quote=444827:@Emile Schwarz]For non USB 3 laptops, is it a good idea to buy an SSD ?
(are they fast enough compared to standard HDs ?)[/quote]
yes
boot from an external usb2 adapter from an ssd or from a hard drive and it’s quite 2x faster.
[quote=444833:@Jean-Yves Pochez]yes
boot from an external usb2 adapter from an ssd or from a hard drive and it’s quite 2x faster.[/quote]
Nonsense.
An internal 2.5in harddisk has a transfer rate of around 60 MB/sec.
According to the USB specification USB2 has a maximum data transfer rate of 480 Mbit/sec, or 60 MB/sec. But that maximum is rarely reached, so a typical transfer rate is around 20-40 MB/sec.
Which is SLOWER than the internal harddisk.
[thats why FireWire 400 beat the pants of USB2 because FireWire had nearly 400MBit/sec SUSTAINED transfer rate, not PEAK transfer rate]
A 2.5in SSD can usually do around 500 MB/sec, but the bottleneck is the USB connection.
In a computer with a SATA3 connection (max throughput 6 Gbit/sec or 750 MB/sec) you get pretty much full speed.
But older computers have SATA2 connectors (max 3 Gbit/sec or 375 MB/sec) so the SSD canöt use its full potential.
But 375 MB/sec internally on SATA2 is still MUCH faster than 30 MB/sec via USB2.
Thats why replacing your internal 60 MB/sec harddisk with a 375 MB/sec SSD feels like having a new computer.
Well, apple has really good SSDs with PCIe attachment.
So I can write on my MacBook Pro over 2 giga bytes per Second to disk, which is very handy.
That is way more, you may get out from an external one.
I went to Offenburg (Germany) some days ago and saw SSD delivered with a USB 2 to USB 3 cable at nice price (for me).
I saw the light and feel I will loose the SSD speed if I use that
On the other hand, my 4 years old MacBook Pro certainly SSD is not build as a 2.5" traditional hard disk, but certainly like standard RAM
Thank you Apple (or my lack of work: depends on the point of view) for their gold laptop (not the color, the metal: price). Even the brand new releases are too expensives. I will probably wait for a new bunch of releases (in 2020 ?).
PS: in my previous MacBook Pro, I replaced my internal HD (6400rpm) with a 1TB 7200 rpm and that was good (really good) and I do not talk about internal memory).
An internal 2.5in harddisk has a transfer rate of around 60 MB/sec.[/quote]
sorry practical sense …
I do this almost everyday. booting from an external hard drive on old macs with usb2
it’s really faster with an ssd than a mechanical hard drive.
surely because hard drives don’t reach the 60MB/s rate except when brand new ?
[quote=444856:@Jean-Yves Pochez]sorry practical sense …
I do this almost everyday. booting from an external hard drive on old macs with usb2
it’s really faster with an ssd than a mechanical hard drive.
surely because hard drives don’t reach the 60MB/s rate except when brand new ?[/quote]
Depends on how old the harddisk is and what its specs are. Very good modern harddisks have transfer rates up to 220 MB/sec, but around 100 MB/sec is the normal speed for modern Harddisks.
Old harddisks? Slow speed to start with, fragmentation, large indexes, cache, internal backups (if you dont have the external backup drive attached it makes internal backups), bad sectors, corrupt files, damaged fonts, background apps (its amazing what people forget that they installed) can all influence the speed of an old drive.
But it should ALWAYS be faster than USB2 unless it is more than ten years old.
