Chosen Solution
My 2011 MBP is still rocking it’s OEM 500GB spinning hard drive since I’ve largely been tolerant of it because I haven’t been around SSDs a lot at the time I purchased it. The problem now is both of my E6220’s and my new production laptop have SSDs and the performance is disgusting to me now to the point I thought my HD cable was bad again when I padded it. I have used the PNY CS900 with success in my first E6220 since it was sold as a No HD system and I’m seriously considering a 500GB version for my 2011 Pro. However, it runs like a DRAM-less SSD but unlike early ones, the performance penalty isn’t an issue. I am looking at getting a 500GB version of it for my MBP. Does MacOS struggle with these DRAM-less SSDs? If it doesn’t, the PNY seems like the best drive to get. I already changed drive cables, so I’m SSD ready.
DRAM-less SSD’s is like putting a souped up engine into your car with the cheapest transmission you could get! I don’t recommend them in Mac systems. The OS the given system has also plays a big role here. As an example the older HFS+ file system does massive moves unlike APFS when you copy a file or move it from location to location on the same volume. But, APFS is very chatty constantly moving markers, unlike HFS which doesn’t need this chattiness. To add to this a SATA based SSD has only one set of write/read queues unlike a PCIe SSD which has a four per lane. So if the SSD needs to handle more APFS transactions the PCIe interface would be better. In the case of SATA SSD with a DRAM cache would off set some of the APFS transaction dialog and with HFS+ will help in its file moves.
