Thought on transcend SSD upgrade for mid 2012 MBP

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THiNK iT

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Hi Guys,
New here, and this is my first post. (Hope it's in the right place)

I have a mid 2012 13" Macbook Pro and want to replace the factory installed 500GB HDD with a 512GB SSD.
Altough i would have liked to get an Intel or Corsair i simply cannot afford either of those at the moment.

I came across a Transcend 512GB SSD (TS512GSSD720) which i can get for R4k including vat, which is within my budget, and also offers the capacity/performance balance im looking for.

But i am not sure how reliable Transcend is, haven't had a lot of experience with any Transcend products.

Any thoughts on transcend reliability/quality ?

***Update***
Also, should i enable TRIM once OSX ML is installed on the drive, or should i just leave it be ?
I have read a plethora of different forms with mixed opinions and its left me confused. Apparently SSD's that are factory-installed with Macbook's have TRIM enabled in OSX but, when an after-market (3rd party) SSD is installed TRIM is disabled or turned-off.

Enable TRIM OSX

According to many formites, the garbage collection feature on most recent SSD's are sufficient to keep the drives performance levels good, but then others say that without TRIM enabled the drives lifespan would decrease.

Any thoughts ?

Any input would be highly appreciated.

Thanx in advance
 
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you sure you need 512GB?
I popped my old 750GB out and put it into an external housing and have a 256GB SSD now, never had problems with storage cos I always have the external in my laptop bag.
Just a though.
 
Been using a Transcend external HDD for my backups for a few months now... Went through the same process of having a look around, since I had never heard of them either.

For what its worth, I ended up getting one - never found anything specific that put me off them, and the price was right enough for me to give it a go. R4k is rather more money though, so guess you're doing the right thing in testing the waters first!
 
I'd go with OWC. Their economy class is the Mercury Electra, at $492 for 480GB is pretty good. These are 512GB SSDs with 7% overprovisioning, 3 year guarantee. FedEx shipping is very cheap. Add VAT at 110% of value. If you have more cash, I'd go with their Mercury Extreme Pro range, $594 for 480GB, 5 year guarantee. Made in the USA.

www.macsales.com
 
No not really, its more for the sake of "future-proofing" in terms of storage capacity.
You make a valid point about the external scenario though.
 
I'm a bit apprehensive about importing things, had things going "missing" once. But i do agree about OWC, have read quite a few decent reviews of them.
 
Also, should i enable TRIM once OSX ML is installed on the drive, or should i just leave it be ?
I have read a plethora of different forms with mixed opinions and its left me confused. Apparently SSD's that are factory-installed with Macbook's have TRIM enabled in OSX but, when an after-market (3rd party) SSD is installed TRIM is disabled or turned-off.

According to many formites, the garbage collection feature on most recent SSD's are sufficient to keep the drives performance levels good, but then others say that without TRIM enabled the drives lifespan would decrease.

Any thoughts ?
 
I don't know! I do think it helps if you can enable it. But the garbage collection is also good on sandforce drives, especially if you utilise 80% of the drive or less.

Best tip I can give you is use superduper to create perfect bootable clones, perfect for moving your system to a new SSD or for backup.
 
A user from Notebookreview.com review told me the following:

"Well I have a friend with a Crucial M4 SSD that also had mixed info on.. some say TRIM some say don't.. some say its built in GC is better, some say its worse...

All of that is beside the fact... we went ahead and enabled TRIM on it after running for several months without.. and everything has been noticeably quicker. I'd say TRIM is a good thing to do."

Although its a one person's experience,i think its worth giving a try and see what happens.
 
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THiNK iT said:
A user from Notebookreview.com review told me the following:

"Well I have a friend with a Crucial M4 SSD that also had mixed info on.. some say TRIM some say don't.. some say its built in GC is better, some say its worse...

All of that is beside the fact... we went ahead and enabled TRIM on it after running for several months without.. and everything has been noticeably quicker. I'd say TRIM is a good thing to do."

Although its a one person's experience,i think its worth giving a try and see what happens.
Click to expand...

I have that drive on win7 & TRIM was enabled by default - it also has its own garbage collection. That's with 10G firmware at least.


Also perhaps gives you your answer here
Just wanted to add my 2 cents. I got the M4 SSD about 3 months ago and put it in a late 2009 MacBook Pro (Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM), at first it was fast (A lot faster than the 5,xxx RPM Spinning HD I had in there before, but not as fast as I thought it would be or had seen on youtube, but still... fast.) and after about 3 months I noticed it was getting really sloooooooow. Even scrolling was hiccuping (This was my first hint something was up), them I remembered the whole thing about TRIM support... I looked it up and found out Mac doesn't support TRIM for 3rd party drives. Awesome. A little more Research and I found "TRIM ENabler" by groths. I installed it, turned on TRIM, restarted, and BAM! Fast again. Good times (This is observation not Benchmark facts, but the difference was pretty obvious).
Click to expand...
http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/TRIM-for-the-Crucial-M4-SSD/td-p/61569/page/3
 
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THiNK iT said:
I'm a bit apprehensive about importing things, had things going "missing" once. But i do agree about OWC, have read quite a few decent reviews of them.
Click to expand...

FedEx delivery is like $35 to SA. If it goes missing they'll ship a new one. Macsales support is very good. They ship out stuff the same day. Anyway I'm running a 480GB Mercury Extreme Pro (SATA II version) now for almost 2 years in a Mac Pro. No problems and no signs of a slow down. My next SSD upgrade in my MacBook Pro will most likely be an OWC drive, just that I don't see a need for one right now.
 
Tun@ said:
I have that drive on win7 & TRIM was enabled by default - it also has its own garbage collection. That's with 10G firmware at least.


Also perhaps gives you your answer here

http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/TRIM-for-the-Crucial-M4-SSD/td-p/61569/page/3
Click to expand...

I've got TRIM enabled in OSX under OSX Lion on my SSD. The thing is that the OWC drive uses internal wear leveling and over provisioning which means it doesn't even need TRIM enabled to work and OWC drives are designed primarily for OSX.
 
Installed an OCZ Vertex III SSD in my MacPro. Without Trim, it seems to work fine. Tried out the TrimEnabler app for interest sake and ML boots up in 5 seconds (1 and a half revolutions of the spinning wheel) as opposed to 10 seconds. So Trim enabled SSD's do run faster for some reason. But still have not found conclusive evidence for or against using it on a SandForce based chipset SSD.
BTW, TrimEnabler just removes the restrictions Apple put in place which prevent Trim from working on aftermarket SSD's.
 
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subxero said:
Installed an OCZ Vertex III SSD in my MacPro. Without Trim, it seems to work fine. Tried out the TrimEnabler app for interest sake and ML boots up in 5 seconds (1 and a half revolutions of the spinning wheel) as opposed to 10 seconds. So Trim enabled SSD's do run faster for some reason. But still have not found conclusive evidence for or against using it on a SandForce based chipset SSD.
BTW, TrimEnabler just removes the restrictions Apple put in place which prevent Trim from working on aftermarket SSD's.
Click to expand...

I initially wanted to use TRIMEnabler, but decided not to due to rumours that it REPLACES a crucial kernel file, causing all kinds of kernel-panics etc. I went with the terminal way of PATCHING the same file myself instead.It seemed safer and i haven't had any issues yet, touch-wood.
 
The older version used to. The newer version uses a different procedure (apparently). I used the terminal script in 10.8.0, but after the 10.8.2 update, it kept giving me an error. So I use the latest TrimEnabler v2.0. Don't like messing with things like this, but curiosity.... get's the better of me.

I did make backup copies of the kexts that it patches - just in case!
 
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