So I'm proud to say that I have a new macbook pro mid-2012.

I didn't get the retina display because there was little you could do to upgrade without unnecessary hardship and risk. This has truly been a great machine to me.

I have two questions:

I upgraded the ram to 16gb and have a sandisk SSD. I've read a lot of posts about how it improves performance and wanted to actually quantify that with my experience. What are some things that I will notice now that I've upgraded ram?

Another question. I know that the SSD is capable of SATA III, but when I look at the settings on the computer, it says that the negotiated link speed is 3 gb instead of the full 6 gb. Is there a way to fix this or is this something apple did?

4/28/2013 12:16:34 AM

if you weren't paging before, you won't notice now, as far as ram goes unless you bought higher bandwidth memory. im not terribly familar with macs pre-boot, but if you can get to the bios or uefi you should be able to set your drive to sata3 vs sata2. you might have to do it in firmware. that's what i had to do on my ocz ssd.

4/28/2013 12:23:29 AM

Honestly, I'm not sure you will notice massive performance increases from increasing your ram, if you already had the ssd

4/28/2013 12:27:23 AM

The drive controller on post 2011 Macbook Pro's should be fully capable of supporting SATA 3 speeds in the primary drive bay. Not sure why it would negotiate to 2.

4/28/2013 5:03:20 PM

Yeah, me too. Maybe an EFI update is necessary? Or maybe they really want to push the retina display. By the way I don't have a retina display (hopefully that was obvious with the specs I provided).

The RAM is allowing me to do a lot more especially when I virtualize windows with Parallels. It takes 15 secs for total boot and move into coherence with a program I choose to run... It's almost as if windows is just another program.

4/30/2013 4:49:13 AM

Yeah, I love parallels on my mac. I have 16GB DDR3 1600 speed RAM, and I can run multiple VMs simultaneously.

Generally, if you already had an SSD, you overall performance won't seem to be much better, but you will notice that you can run multiple applications at around the same speed as if you were only running one. It's a bandwidth increase, not necessarily an overall speed increase, considering your bottleneck is usually the hard drive before it's the Processor (if modern) or RAM (Having 8GB+ of RAM).

[Edited on April 30, 2013 at 9:13 AM. Reason : -]

4/30/2013 9:05:52 AM

Ok I figured it out. So the SSD was originally was in the 2008 MBP, and when I had switched to my newer one, I had set the firmware back to the original... but it didn't left the lock which specifically set the SSD at SATA II. I had to update the firmware that ultimately unlocked the SSD to reach 6 gb/sec.

5/10/2013 7:08:07 PM