Hey Apple MacBookPro gurus! I need your help. Any one of you swapped your MBP Mid 2012 drive for a Samsung QVO 870 SSD? I maxed out the RAM to 16 GB and I'm considering getting the 8TB version to turn it into a total audio production beast running Mojave. I know I can upgrade to Catalina, but I'm not a fan. Please share your wisdom. Thanks.

 

I used CarbonCopyCloner to make a bootable clone of my drive, stuck it on the SSD, and done!
I know you are specifically asking about that model of Samsung, and I don't know if that is good or not for your hardware.
But either way, it's all good to do what you are doing.
I actually took out the original HDD and the SuperDrive, so I have two SSDs in mine.
Used that caddy thing from Crucial.

 

Stay on Mojave, i Have one macbook pro mid 2012, 2tb ssd WD and 16GB but i considering upgrade to a MBP 2019 16" base model.
The problem for me is the old CPU, anyway the 2012 is a great machine.

 

Thanks for replying I've considered removing the superdrive for a much sicker configuration, (up to 16 tb or a nice 8 TB raid configuration if you use that ssd drive model), but I like to have it available for booting and whatnot.

 

Agreed. My current setup for my MBP is 16 GB RAM and 4 TB SSD.

 

Hello friend! I did exactly (almost) what your are contemplating and HIGHLY recommend it! Same model, I took out the original HDD and the Superdrive (as Smooth Grooves did) and used the mentioned Crucial caddy. Maxed the RAM out to 16. Replaced the main drive with the 8TB Samsung SSD and stuck another 4TB Samsung SSD in the 2nd drive bay. I can confirm they work great! My MBP is indeed a monster and an extremely portable and capable little studio. I'm so pleased with it I am considering swapping out the 2nd 4TB SSD with the 8TB! Sounds crazy to some people but I've been on the quest for years to be able to have a truly portable system that has power and I've finally achieved that. It's pricey but IMO very much worth it. It's a bummer the newer MacBooks that came out after this one are so limited on how much they can be upgraded. Also I stayed with Mojave 10.14 and did not change to Catalina. Too many software compatibility issues. Have fun!

 

Thanks for sharing. That 8 TB Samsung that you're using, is it the 870?

 

Yes, 870 QVO

 

I have the exact same model MBP, maxed out 16 GBs RAM. I opted to do the following: get rid of my optical drive (I have an external OWC Blu-ray M-Disc burner) and replace that with a 7200 RPM 1 TB HDD (Hitachi Travelstar), then replaced the system HDD with a 2 TB Crucial MX500 SSD. Works pretty great (the size of the system drive was necessary for all my sample libraries!).

 

@kingchubby Ah. And if there is a macOS 'option' involved in this question, then you could also do what I did:
I kept the old HDD that I created the bootable clone from, and tested it with subsequent OSs to see how my cpu liked it or not, and to test plugin compatability etc. I just bought a cheap connector so I could run it externally.

 

Good one!

 

I'm using old 840 EVO with my "maxxed" 13" MBP 2012 (16GB ram, i7, second drive is 1TB HDD instead of optical drive),
I don't recommend QVO series if you can get something like EVO, or even better PRO series, they shall perform better long-term

 

Those specs are the same as my Macbook Pro. I myself replaced the optical drive with a 7200 RPM HDD for data. HDDs are good for recovering lost data; with Disk Drill, I have been able to recover a good 99% of data from an "erased" HDD. My project files go on that drive. I also have one of the USB ports occupied by a 256GB shorty USB drive, where my libraries go (Arturia, Gforce, Spitfire LABS, Waves, Battery, Reaktor) rather than on my system drive.
I moved to Mojave from High Sierra mainly to go easier on my eyes with the dark mode, and everything I use survived the move except for Best Service Engine (K'd), with which I was using the Synth-Werk library, fortunately, I'd kept a partition of High Sierra on the SSD, with Synth-Werk still available to me in Logic there. I'm not impressed with Catalina, and dissuaded from using it by all the breakage of plug-ins and such.
(One thing worth noting: the newer APFS-format OSes cannot be backed-up on HDDs, due to how they're designed to run on SSDs. One can back them up on HDDs, but very slowly, and running any application on a HDD formatted with APFS is like swimming in mud.)

 

I have both EVO and PRO in other machines, but they max out at 4 TB for now.

 

to be perfectly honest, although I embrace SSDs as the only worthy drives for studio rigs nowadays, I would NOT go for such large capacity SSD unless absolutely not having any other option (like multiple drives, nas array etc..),
because frankly one of my 500GB 860 EVOs bricked within less than year of casual usage, luckily it was just a system+programs drive so no valuable data loss, and luckily I was given a new piece as a within-warranty replacement, but such occurrence reminded me of how unreliable a single-storage solution remains to be, no matter if it's HDD or SSD,

as you previously mentioned upgrading into "only" 16GB ram, I don't assume you'd be able to run sh!tton of libraries or tracks anyway, so in my eyes having such massive amount of storage would be basically wasted, populated with data you wouldn't even use once a year - in which case external SSD might do just fine perhaps?

if I were in a situation of considering 8TB SSD, I might simply just get a Mac Mini with no less than 2x cpu performance and upgradeable up to 64GB ram, for me that would seem as more useful value than that much bigger SSD storage
...just thoughts

EDIT: I remember why I always prefered anything but QVO - if you check warranty, those cheapest QVOs have 3 years, then regular EVOs have 5 years, and PROs have also 5 years - it may be unimportant, but there must be a reason Samsung skimps on that

 

I

I backup stuff like you wouldn't believe to avoid crashes or hard drive failures, but definitely good points to consider.

 

curious if you ended up putting the 8tb in after all and if it worked out?

 

i do have the money to pull it off. now if i have the time to do it. once i do, i will post my results.

 

8TB is absolutely ridiculous, for a startup disc. if you do this, i would suggest partitioning it, and keep the actual startup disc to 500 gb or less, and the rest for samples/storage.

if you or anyone else has ever had any real audio production classes, they will tell you this:

#1 - your startup disc/boot drive (mac or win, doesn't really matter) shouldn't be extra large - 500gb is more than enough - because otherwise, it takes much longer to index and seek times will suffer, whether you've filled it up mostly, half way or even just a litte... it's just too much ridiculous space for the system to seek through. put your crap elsewhere lol!

#2 - Samples and large virtual instrument content, such as spectrasonics stuff, and esp large kontakt libraries - should be relegated to separate drive for samples, so the constant streaming work for that drive, is not interrupted by constantly running the computer, the daw, the plugins, and all other applications you're running at the same time... and that stuff should certainly not be on your sessions/work drive, either (see #3)

#3 - Sessions/work should DEF be relegated to a separate drive, and also not on your startup disk. as many tracks as you have per session, that's how many times every moment that drive must work to stream the data for your audio, video or other work - video even more stressful than audio - so you should have at least one SSD for work only. using a RAID SSD setup here works even better, or at least have a time machine or other backup solution available - as there is no data recovery from SSD, if it fails! (see #4) - if you put all your work on one drive/ssd.

#4 - A backup solution is a must these days, because there is no data recovery from a failed flash/solid state drive. depends on the failure... something like Disc Warrior can still be used if the drive was only volume damaged, but not recommended to play the chance - have a dedicated backup drive! (pref large spinny sata hard drive, that can def get full data recovery, if it fails).

A 2012 model MBP's are great, and would def recommend removing the old cd/dvd disc drive and getting the tray for a second internal drive, pref SSD. a 1-2 TB ssd is more than enough for all your work and storage, or at least should be (see #1... even for data). Your startup disc should simply be limited to 500gb for your startup disc, or at least limit it partition wise. but again... if you're streaming content from the same disc, whether partitioned or not, it is too much for one disc, and failure rate is much more imminent and much sooner, than if not.

you can find the "macbook pro hd caddy' on amazon for $8.99 us.

you can get a 4,6 or 8 TB ext usb3 sata drive for backup, like 100-150 by seagate/wd/toshiba, etc...

good luck and happy mac computing