Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsboots quick, but has its issues
Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2017
I am the stereotypical purchaser of this item, I suspect: I have a MBP 5,5 from mid 2009. It has always done what I wanted, but creates a lot of heat in some situations and, as the original HD was nearing full, I was tempted by the siren's song of SSD. So I got this drive and ordered the company's 2x4gb ram upgrade for the same machine. I had an existing SATA to USB (2) cable and so I was fairly sure I could clone my HD to the SSD and the swap the new one in. That much went well; for reference, my drive was over 200gb and it took about 3.5 hours to transfer and verify to the SSD through that USB 2 port/cable. Now for the bad news; the RAM upgrade failed. I tried to two chips in both slots, I seated and reseated them, but only got the 3 beeps of death whenever I tried to start up. There is ferment on the internet about flexing things with screwdrivers, but I don't think that's a good idea warranty-wise. Just my two cents. The drive boots faster and is quieter and it may also even run down the battery slower; I have no benchmark data to pass along sorry. But it has given me at least a couple of problems: the first is the very well-documented one of causing the thermal sensors to turn the fans on more often and for longer periods. The internet also offers workarounds for that, but I can't endorse any of those here. One other problem is when waking from a long period of lid-down sleep the touch pad refuses to work unless you restart. Consequently I leave it to sleep open now. I undertook these upgrades because of the new drive's capacity (the SSD is 2x the old HD) and speed and, just for full-disclosure's sake, because I test drove a new MBP with the "power bar" and I hate that thing. I likes my esc key! So I might downgrade to a MB sometime in the future whenever I really, really, really need a new one. Given what has occurred, however, to do over again I would likely just buy an external drive for more storage and leave well-enough alone. PS--I did return the ram chips and amazon refunded me.
