Instructions: Upgrade with third-party SSD In the following instructions I describe this path in detail and step-by-step. If you are looking for the simplest possible SSD upgrade, without compatibility problems and additional tinkering effort, it is clearly recommended to buy an upgrade kit from a third party manufacturer. Installation is quite easy, only a few screws, the upgrade kit from Transcend comes with all necessary material and tools Increased time and motivation for troubleshooting may be necessary, not all combinations run error-free right from the start Installation is quite easy, just a few screws Speed slightly slower than original Apple SSD Requires special adapter, problem-free operation cannot be guaranteed, compatibility problems may occur (not all M.2 SSDs work without problems), troubleshooting may be necessary, tinkering, standby time may be shorter SSD guaranteed to work, compatible with MacBook, no tinkeringĪpple-SSD not available on the market, only (used) on eBay

Use of a standard M.2 SSD, (mostly) very fast SSD is guaranteed to work, no tinkering, full speed Here is a brief comparison with the various advantages and disadvantages of the individual methods: Meanwhile, third-party manufacturers offer special SSD modules and M.2 adapters that enable an upgrade of the storage space.īasically there are now three possibilities to upgrade the SSD of the Macbook Pro Retina. Fortunately this has now (at least partially) changed. This all adds up to become a very potential laptop, even tho its from 2011.Due to the special SSD design Apple uses in the Macbook Pro Retina, upgrading has so far been difficult. Mine throttles to 2.6-2.7Ghz (instead 3.6GHZ) under 100% load pre thermal paste change.Ĭoollaboratory liquid copper (its not liquid metal) or Thermal grizzly kryonaut will do the job.Įxtreme but efficient, drill holes in bottom case.Ģ, add 16GB of 2133Mhz CL11 RAM from Kingston - hyperx impact - would give your laptop a very, very nice boost.ģ, tweak the intelHD3000 up to 1GB vRAM also helps. Not fun.ġ, Add new thermal paste, gives a good boost in performance since the CPU throtteling kicks in very early in our models.

Aluminum foil would also work, but looks like **** and could also potentially cause shorts. A RAID 0 setup would give you 1GB/s+ in both read and write with samsung 850 PRO SSD!īest way (and easiest) to do it is using aluminium or copper tape to shield it all - cable + caddy/SSD assy (any caddy would do). SATA 3 speed works in optibay if your model supports SATA 3 iaw your system info.

Macbook pro 2011 ssd compatibility