- Jan 20, 2013
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So I'm upgrading/maxing out the capacities of my early 2008 MacBook. Replacing a long-defunct optical drive, doubling the RAM, upgrading to the highest supported OS X version, and otherwise just doing a nice cleaning, both physically and digitally (probably going to do a full formatting of the HDD, do a clean re-install, and restore all my documents from backup.
If I were to get an SSD, I wouldn't pull the trigger until after I had everything running smoothly once again (the thing is in pieces at the moment), since SSDs are a bit of an investment. For the same reason, I'd probably buy around Black Friday or something like that to snag a deal. I don't mind waiting.
My question, though, is this: I would imagine that an '08 MacBook would have been built with SATA2 (3Gb/s) connections. Will an SSD still benefit the system? I just don't want to buy an SSD and then bottleneck it... What a waste.
EDIT: Can anyone elaborate on the technical side of this? I want to know if my reasoning is sound on the "how" of it:
Let's assume I have a 7200rpm HDD right now (I need to double-check). As per the 2010 standard (roughly the vintage of my HDD), my current maximum throughput would be around 1.00 Gb/sec (1,030 Mb/s; Wikipedia). SATA2, having a maximum bandwidth of 3.0Gb/s, would not use the full potential of, say, a Samsung 840, which has a maximum write speed of 530MB/s (4.14Gb/s), but would still theoretically triple my maximum throughput when it caps out at 3.0Gb/s.
Yes?
If I were to get an SSD, I wouldn't pull the trigger until after I had everything running smoothly once again (the thing is in pieces at the moment), since SSDs are a bit of an investment. For the same reason, I'd probably buy around Black Friday or something like that to snag a deal. I don't mind waiting.
My question, though, is this: I would imagine that an '08 MacBook would have been built with SATA2 (3Gb/s) connections. Will an SSD still benefit the system? I just don't want to buy an SSD and then bottleneck it... What a waste.
EDIT: Can anyone elaborate on the technical side of this? I want to know if my reasoning is sound on the "how" of it:
Let's assume I have a 7200rpm HDD right now (I need to double-check). As per the 2010 standard (roughly the vintage of my HDD), my current maximum throughput would be around 1.00 Gb/sec (1,030 Mb/s; Wikipedia). SATA2, having a maximum bandwidth of 3.0Gb/s, would not use the full potential of, say, a Samsung 840, which has a maximum write speed of 530MB/s (4.14Gb/s), but would still theoretically triple my maximum throughput when it caps out at 3.0Gb/s.
Yes?
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