This review is for both the 16.0GB (2x 8GB) PC3-10600 DDR3 1333MHz Memory Upgrade (OWC1333DDR316P) and the Solid State Drive Kit (OWCY3SSD6E480) which includes the OWC Mercury Electra 6G SSD 480GB drive. These were installed in a Apple Macbook Pro (Macbook8,1 – Early 2011 2.3Ghz; which had the original 4GB of memory and 320 Gig HDD with approximately 38 GB free, and macOS Sierra 10.12.3). I also did a clean install of MacOS Sierra as was recommended in the OWC/Macsales help guides.
Prior to upgrading I was extremely frustrated with the computer and was ready to buy a new mac. All of my applications took forever to open (>1 minute to open any one application was common, sometimes 2-3 minutes when other applications were open). Also, I was getting the spinning beach ball/pinwheel of death continuously during normal use, and any time I had more than a few browser tabs open and/or more than one application (like Word or Excel). I was NOT doing any kind of truly heavy lifting like photo or graphics editing. As a result, I even tested for viruses or malware thinking that there was no way the computer could be running this slow otherwise.
However, after checking the Activity Monitor (memory tab) for memory utilization it became clear that it was maxed and that there was a lot of disk swapping going on to manage the lack of memory. Checking the same after the upgrade, I’m regularly seeing 12GB of ‘Memory Use:’ of the 16GB available. This is occurring, for example, when I am typing this review, and have Chrome open with 16 tabs open (many news articles), also Excel, Word, and a cloud storage application. All of these are essentially idle while I’m typing, but nonetheless, 12 GB of memory used—this is not a technical analysis, but surely with only 4GB previously, this must explain the beach ball of death?
Immediately after performing both upgrades, and completing the clean install of macOS Sierra and transferring over my data from the old HDD, I tried an experiment: I clicked to open Chrome, Firefox, Word, and Excel one after another as quickly as I could. Previously, opening even two of these at once caused my macbook to choke, in this case all of them opened in <30 seconds. Incredible difference.
In summary, my macbook is running like a brand new computer, and I highly recommend this upgrade path for anyone who has a similar macbook. I used the helpguides available for backing up my existing drive, installing macOS Sierra and transferring the existing data to the new SSD. Also the videos on installing the memory and the hard drive, both of which was very easy to do on my mac.