😔 macOS Sierra MacBook Pro 2011

[iN8ter]

If you replace your hdd with a ssd the macbook will boot and work a lot faster! It will blow your mind!

This samsung EVO 850 500GB is really good

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It is also trim enabled. On your macbook pro 2011 you can enable trim. There are a lot of tutorials on the internet how to do this.

Trim keeps your flash memory appropriately cycled so that you can achieve faster read and write speeds, as well as a longer lifespan for your SSD.

Pretty sure Sierra allows you to enable Trip without having to go through any hoops, unless I read fake news...

Also, I'm not sure splurging on an expensive 500GB SSD is worth it for a machine that old, when you can get by with a ~$100 Evo or Intel SSD at 240-256GB Capacity which has >400MB R/W speeds.

Get the cheaper SSD, and use that extra money to upgrade the RAM... and possibly replace the battery, if you can get that done on the cheap. Once the machine is open, it costs almost nothing extra in labor to do that... you'd basically only be paying for the part.

 

[iN8ter]

I'm on a early-2011 MacBook pro and I've not noticed any slowdowns as you've described, but my battery flow very quickly and the fans working all the time.

Old Machine, likely with some dust in it, which is built with lots of components that generate quite a bit of heat compared to today's notebook computers. That's normal, especially after quite a few years of ownership.

Also depends on what type of applications you're running, as well.

A friend of mine has a 2011 MacBook Pro, and she's done nothing but complain about performance and beach balls since upgrading to Sierra.

 

[LPariseau]

I have the same computer but have 16 G ram and a 1 Tb SSD drive -- no problems with speed but other problems - like the battery gets sucked up in 1/2 the time and I can't back up to my Time Machine drives.