Revving up an early-2011 17″ MacBook Pro to 16GB of Memory
I recently upgraded my 2009 17″ MacBook Pro to the newer 2011 model. I was torn on the upgrade because I’m losing some horsepower on a per-core basis (2.6Ghz down to 2.3Ghz) but I picked up two additional cores in the deal. That plus hyperthreading and we’ve got up to 8 parallel threads cranking at once. So, from a processor perspective I think its a positive trade.
Memory was the original 8GB from Apple but I saw that OWC had 8GB DIMMs for the Mac and putting in a pair of them gave me 16GB. That was quite a boost in terms of real memory. I’d say for most people its more memory than they need but for me I generally run a VM or two and 8GB is really not enough. Running Lotus Notes for e-mail, Sametime and other Java based applications tend to burn up memory pretty quickly. So, paging was bad for the SSD.
I’m currently running a Kingston SSDNow 512GB drive and it makes all the difference from a performance perspective. In my opinion, if you’re going to do one upgrade the SSD will give you the biggest bang for the buck in terms of overall performance and user experience.
I’ve been looking at possibly running two 512GB SSDs in the MacBook Pro by removing the DVD (never really use it anyway) and putting in a second 512GB SSD and running as RAID 0 to see if there is a significant performance boost. Should I run into and extra one I may give that a go.
At this point the Mac is working great and I’m not seeing any issues due to the memory upgrade. Here is what it looks like:
Now we’ll see what happens to my battery life.
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Comments
Hi!
I’m buying a macbook pro 17” in the next couple days and I wanted to know if you managed to take out the DVD drive and put the SSD.
How is it going with the 16GB of ram?
cheers,
The 16GB is going well, no noticeable impact on battery life and the use of VMs via VMware Fusion is excellent. I’m running a Windows guest to host some tools that are Windows only and its pretty snappy at 4GB of memory for the guest.
I haven’t installed the data doubler yet as I’ve been busy. Nothing better than telling people you would have been ready for something except for that last minute upgrade 
All in all, very happy.
Noticed this link about firmware upgrades to take your SATA devices to 6Gb/s. Make sure you check the speed of your SSD drive if your installing one so you get the most out of it. Mine are 3Gb/s 
How is the battery life. I have a 13″ with 8GB and a 7200 750 GB and my battery life is best around 2.5 – 3hours and I’m only running one virtual casually but in future I plan to run 3 virtuals in a domain simulation. I need at least two hour battery life and I’m worried 16GB may seriously cut the 2.5 – 3 hours I currently am experiencing and with a 137 cycle count do not believe a new battery will help. What has been your experience with your 16GB. Thanks.
The battery life is very good. I find that the thing that most significant impacts my battery life is the display. So, when traveling, I generally disable the wireless and bluetooth as well as run the display at an acceptable level and I can eek out about 5 1/2 hours if I’m using Word or other non-cpu intensive jobs. bottom line, the memory isn’t the issue in long battery life, at least not for me.
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