Compatible Solid-State Drive upgrades for Macs

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Compatible Solid-State Drive Upgrades for your Mac

For those wanting to speed up your Macs, Solid-State Drive upgrades for Macs to replace your traditional hard disk can be one of the best upgrade you can ever do. Macs are notoriously reliable if you take good care of them.

However, not all SSDs are provide the fastest performance for certain Macbook, Macbook Pro, and iMac particularly those with Nvidia MCP79 chipset. If you decide to install a SSD by yourself and choose the wrong drive, you could end up only achieving half the data transfer speed your Mac is designed for.

You can check which chipset your Mac has by going to About This Mac>System Report>SATA/SATA Express.

Solid-State Drive upgrades for Macs

A compatible SSD will show the same Link Speed and Negotiated Link Speed

When you have one of these Macs and you install a Solid-State Drive (SSD) with a Sandforce chipset, you might face an issues where your transfer speed decreases be half as the chipset and the drive you have is incompatible. The Mac will show a negotiated link speed  of either 1.5 Gigabit if your Link Speed is 3 Gigabit (SATA 2) or 3 Gigabit if your Link Speed is 6 Gigabit (SATA 3). Macs before 2011 uses SATA 1 or 2, and later Macs uses SATA 3, which is faster.

Mac upgraded with incompatible Solid State Drive achieving only half the transfer speeds

The Samsung 840 Evo has issues as well. It uses a MEX controller.

If you have one of those Macs, the most compatible product is Crucial. The older BX100 uses a Marvell controller. The current BX200 uses a Silicon Motion controller. We have installed a lot of Crucial users without issues.

The newer Samsung 850 Evo and newest Evo 750do do not appear to have such issues. If you have a Mac that is older than 2011, we still recommend Crucial SSDs for both reliability and cost savings.

Read more about the issue here.

Do check out our current range of Solid-State Drive (SSD) upgrades for your Mac.

We are crazy enough to rush downtown for a metal rotary tool to unscrew a stuck screw so that you can get your Mac back next day

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Call us crazy if you will but we like to think of ourselves as passionate. While doing a routine LCD replacement for our customer today, we encountered an issue that all repairers hate.

A stuck screw.

Sometimes Apple uses screws made of soft metal that are screwed too tight. The screw head gets stripped bare when we use our screwdrivers to turn them and there is no way a regular screwdriver can get it out.

So Edmond rushed down to Chinatown to get a trusty Dremel tool, prepare a vacuum to suck up flying bits of metal dust, cover up the important parts of the Mac and there you go! A deep slit was made on the screw so that it can be unscrewed (with the help of Edmond’s strong-armed Dad) with a flat head screwdriver.

Macbook repairs Macbook LCD replacement


All these were done with the permission of the customer of course.

We are not carpenters or smiths. But we are passionate enough to try all means to repair your Mac.

Dispelling the “dunk in rice or blow with hairdyrer to revive Macs or iPhones spilled with liquid” myth

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If you have a water damaged Macbook, it is ALWAYS a bad idea to put it into rice. The internet myth is that rice will absorb moisture from your gadget, and you have a chance of getting it working again.

The fact is, leaving your gadget in rice is the same as leaving it out in the open. If fact, leaving it in the open might help with evaporation even better. This method sometimes works because some people get lucky, or the amount of water spilled is minute. The fact is, most of the time, your device is too tightly sealed for water to escape throughly, and leaving it in a close container allows for corrosion to set in.

Water damaged Macbook logicboard

Eww! Corrosion on a Macbook Pro Logicboard.

Using a hair dyer is worse. The air from your dryer usually isn’t strong enough to blow the liquid off the device, especially when the covers are still on. It pushes liquid further into the crevices of the device instead.

If you spill liquid on your Mac, the best thing to do is quickly shut it down using the power button, with the lid open at 90 degrees, invert the Mac and let the keyboard rest on a cloth on the edge of your table if you are not able to send it to a repair shop immediately.

The next thing to do is to contact a reputable repair centre that specialise in repairing liquid damaged Macs.

At Mac Plus we have been able to repair almost all water damaged Macbook Pro, Macbook Air and Macbook Retina. There were two which we did not manage to repair as the owners sent in their Macs after leaving the Mac un-repaired for a month. The corrosion was too widespread and invasive.

Contact us if you need reliable Mac repairs, Mac SSD upgrades and Mac RAM upgrades. We provide Wifi signal issue solutions as well.

See our Facebook: www.facebook.com/macplus.sg for our 5 star reviews!

Yet another black sheep repair shop

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As we do Mac repairs as well, there’s a conflict of interest when we name other industry players with less honourable ethics so we can’t name them, lest we are accused of shaming our competitors. We only share the experiences of our customers because we feel that customers should be warned of such places.

This particular black sheep repair shop has 3 star ratings on their Facebook and their webpage lists several temporary operating locations in central and eastern areas of Singapore. It is helmed by foreigners.

My customer called to ask for advice regarding a Macbook Air repair that has water spillage that was supposedly repaired by that particular shop. He was charged $200+ for the repair, but after a few days, the Macbook Air was not able to charge. When we went back to the shop, they told him there was nothing further they could do because the logicboard was damaged and it needed a new logicboard, and the amount he was charged was not refundable.

I advised the customer to go back to ask for a refund instead of persuading him to bring his Macbook Air down for a repair with us as I did not want him to end up paying more for repairs without first closing his case with the first repair shop.

Another of our regular customer went to them to repair her Mac. She had forgotten that she had gotten her Mac serviced by us before and was satisfied with our service. She said she would have brought her Mac to us but went to them as she had forgotten about Mac Plus in her haste to get her Mac repaired. The company in question wanted to format her flash drive, citing that it had issues, even though the flash drive was not the component that she had gone there for repairs for.

Yet another customer called us to ask if we could diagnose his Macbook Pro Retina, as his computer could not start after speaker replacement done by the shop and they did not know what was wrong.

At Mac Plus, rest assured all our repairs comes with a no-repair, no-charge guarantee. Diagnosis is always free for preliminary checks. If further intensive diagnosis needs to be performed, we will inform you of the fees beforehand.