Crucial m4 128GB 2.5-Inch (9.5mm) SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive CT128M4SSD2

I bought this as an upgrade to my MacBook Pro 13-inch (mid-2012), which I received last week. Considering that Apple.ca were asking $500 to upgrade to a 256GB SSD, I thought I'd go the DIY route via Crucial M4 and Amazon (plus I get to keep the original 500GB HD). As usual Amazon's price and service were excellent; $210 including the taxes, free delivery and arrived within a week - what more could you ask for? The upgrade was simple, I have a cable kit with a USB/SATA/Power connector so I hooked up the Crucial M4 to the USB and cloned the exisiting HD using Carbon Copy Cloner (free). There were 10 small screws holding on the back off the MacBook Pro; 2 small screws to remove the HD clamp, 4 locating studs to swap from the HD to the Crucial M4 - disassembly complete. The Crucial M4 plugged straight into the existing SATA connector and then it was a case of reassembling. All-in-all it took about 20 mins. I reset the PRAM and NVRAM on the first boot-up of the MacBook Pro (press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys) and used Disk Utility to repair the permissions. After a quick test to make sure everything was running okay I downloaded the latest firmware (000F) for the Crucial M4 and burned it to a CD using Disk Utility. The firmware upgrade was simply as case of loading the CD, rebooting the MacBook Pro and holding down the C. The MacBook Pro booted from the CD, recognized the Crucial M4 and pre-loaded in the firmware. All I had to do was type 'yes' and a few seconds later the upgrade was done.

With respect to enabling TRIM support or not, I decided not to bother, you can Google the issue to make your own decision. There is a freely available app called 'Trim Enabler' should you decide you want to try it. Whether the performance of my Crucial M4 will suffer without TRIM enabled, only time will tell.

For now though, I can report excellent performance from the Crucial M4. I've had no performance issues, i.e. spinning beach-balls, moments of unresponsiveness or crashes etc, everything seems to be running as clockwork. In terms of performance stats, as I write this Disk Speed is reporting 268MB/s write and 502MB/s read, and my boot-up time is now only 17-seconds. The only remaining unknown is longevity, that said, with a 3-year warranty I'd like to think Crucial have that covered. So far I am very pleased with the Crucial M4 and Amazon's service, both of which I can thoroughly recommend.

Edit: I've added a video to give you an idea of the real world speed you can expect when opening multiple apps.

Before purchasing the SSD I was unsure whether it would work well. After hearing some stories of random crashes and lags about the product, I decided to look further into it before buying it. The M4 Compatibility checker found this particular SSD and so I bought the harddrive and it works really well. No lags, no crashes. The battery lasts much longer (25% longer).

SSD provide a huge boost for your machine and work well with Apple MacBook products. M4 is great!

This SSD greatly improved my boot time, load times, and Windows Experience Index (WEI). My boot time before this drive was over 3 minutes, after installation, it was down to 49 seconds! Programs load in an instant. WEI is now bottlenecked on my GPU. Haven't had any boot issues or program freezes. But I would highly suggest buying two... after my Windows install, I had about 75 gigs. If you have a bunch of Steam games, this will fill up pretty quickly. I tried installing games on my other drives, makes it a little choppy just because the read/write speed on the HDD isn't the best.