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Recent-ish (10.7 and later) versions of macOS tend to fall apart under memory pressure with traditional hard disks-- more so than previous versions did or than

Recent-ish (10.7 and later) versions of macOS tend to fall apart under memory pressure with traditional hard disks-- more so than previous versions did or than Windows does on similar hardware. My hunch is that they changed something in their virtual memory subsystem to takes advantage of characteristics of SSDs that isn't quite so friendly when your drive has significant seek times. A consequence of this is that an SSD upgrade in machines of that era can be quite dramatic, especially if you're memory-constrained. Might not be too helpful in the 2008-era machine (an SSD might be bus-limited there, not sure what generation of SATA those machines have), but the impact on a 2012-era machine (if it shipped with a traditional hard disk) can be huge.

CPLX 8y ago
Yup. I have an office full of Mac mini’s from the 2014 series. The real basic ones with a SSD swapped in are totally fast and viable machines for just about anyone that’s not doing video or data intensive stuff.
gshubert17 8y ago
My 2009 iMac, though not a laptop, benefitted from a swap to an SSD from the HD. At the same time I added more ram to total 8 GB. It works very well for me.
- sprocket 8y ago
  That's also my experience with a 2009 MBP. Swapped out the HD for an SSD, maxed the RAM, and put in a new battery, and had an adequate machine for most daily tasks. It showed it's age and lagged a lot with more intensive software like Fusion 360, but overall was a pretty good machine for 10 years.
cimmanom 8y ago
Yes. During that period when you could get 64GB in a Windows desktop replacement laptop but only 16 in a top-of-the-line MBP, they reworked their memory systems to (IIRC) do some sort of predictive paging to improve responsiveness under memory pressure. It's surprisingly effective with an SSD and even just 8GB RAM, though 16GB is still more comfortable. It seems to work better when the memory demand is coming from multiple apps rather than from a single app with lots of windows/tabs/etc.
isostatic 8y ago
> Recent-ish (10.7 and later) versions 10.7 (Lion) came out nearly 8 years ago. That's the sort of difference in time between windows 3.1 and windows XP

CPLX 8y ago

Yup. I have an office full of Mac mini’s from the 2014 series. The real basic ones with a SSD swapped in are totally fast and viable machines for just about anyone that’s not doing video or data intensive stuff.

gshubert17 8y ago

My 2009 iMac, though not a laptop, benefitted from a swap to an SSD from the HD. At the same time I added more ram to total 8 GB. It works very well for me.

sprocket 8y ago
That's also my experience with a 2009 MBP. Swapped out the HD for an SSD, maxed the RAM, and put in a new battery, and had an adequate machine for most daily tasks. It showed it's age and lagged a lot with more intensive software like Fusion 360, but overall was a pretty good machine for 10 years.

cimmanom 8y ago

Yes. During that period when you could get 64GB in a Windows desktop replacement laptop but only 16 in a top-of-the-line MBP, they reworked their memory systems to (IIRC) do some sort of predictive paging to improve responsiveness under memory pressure. It's surprisingly effective with an SSD and even just 8GB RAM, though 16GB is still more comfortable. It seems to work better when the memory demand is coming from multiple apps rather than from a single app with lots of windows/tabs/etc.

isostatic 8y ago

> Recent-ish (10.7 and later) versions 10.7 (Lion) came out nearly 8 years ago. That's the sort of difference in time between windows 3.1 and windows XP