For quite some time now, my mid 2012 MacBook Pro has been struggling, and as I'm a photographer, it was impacting heavily on my workflow and I could regularly be found swearing profusely at it when it seized up, the rainbow wheel would appear and it would refuse to respond for lengthy periods. It was slow to boot up, and using Creative Cloud was an absolute chore, both Lightroom and Photoshop were incredibly slow and laborious to use. I had put this down to successive OSX updates, simply because after each one, I noticed slowdowns, despite the supposed improvements to performance and efficiency that were proudly trumpeted by Apple.



I spent some time having a look at the current range of MacBooks wondering if it may be time to just get a new computer, however, I found that the included storage was completely inadequate (something of a trend right across all manufacturers, not just Apple), and they come with soldered in flash based memory that cannot be upgraded. My only alternative was to replace the hard drive with a solid state drive, and this Sandisk Ultra II SSD seemed to offer a balance of speed, size and price, so I decided to give it a go instead of throwing a truck load of cash at a new laptop.



Anyone who has fitted one of these drives will tell you it's very easy, simple almost, the cloning of the old hard drive is what takes the time. Once installation was complete, I started my Macbook up and it took a couple of minutes to acquaint itself with it's new drive, after that, the speed increases were impressive. It now starts up in thirty seconds, as opposed to the five minutes it used to take. It now takes Lightroom three minutes to stitch together five 28gb files into a panorama, that used to take anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes! Even opening web pages is quicker, my computer is now running better than when it was new!



This SSD has saved my old MacBook from going on the scrapheap, as that's all it used to be good for, it really is worth the money for the performance increases I have seen.