The majority of the weekend was taken up with birthday activities for the wife so I had to wait until Sunday evening to finally upgrade my old 2009 17 inch MacBook Pro with a new 1TB solid state drive (SSD). I love the design of the MacBooks of this era because the internal component are easily accessible. The upgrade took all of about 2 hours, and that included the data migration. I did the same for my 2007 MacBook Pro a few months back but it was far more difficult to install the SSD due to the construction of the case.
I decided it was time to upgrade since the price of SSDs are dropping as their capacity continues to increase. The new SSD will add a few more years to my old machine. Plus I need a decent laptop to practice my iOS app development training but I didn’t feel like dropping 2 grand plus for a new machine. It is amazing when a couple of hundred dollars will suffice by providing a substantial upgrade to an aging laptop. I snagged the Samsung 840 EVO-Series 1TB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive
The final outcome is that I feel like I have gotten a new laptop. The boot times and file access on the machine have dropped significantly. I maxed out the RAM a few years back so there is not much left that I can do to speed up the machine at this point. I might swap out the internal DVD (SuperDrive) and replace it with a second SSD for storage, but that is just more for convenience, not performance. Hopefully, Apple won’t phase out support for this machine out when they release Yosemite (OS X 10.10) later this year because I really love this system now.