Corsair Force Series 3 with Macbook Pro (15" Early 2011)
Just in-case you where interested/thinking of upgrading, I can confirm that the Corsair Force Series 3 is 100% compatible with the Early 2011 Macbook Pro. I have the 15″ version, but I’d imagine that it would be the case for all screen sizes. I opted for the 120GB model – I wasn’t sure that I would have enough room to begin with, I’ve got pretty much everything I need installed and still have 90GB+ free (after following instructions on disabling your sleepimage file here: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070302210328928). At the same time as upgrading to an SSD, I got an 8GB DDR3 RAM kit (for the bargainous price of £34.99). Shutdown time is about 6 seconds, and boot-up time is around 16 seconds. While boot up time isn’t a terribly important factor to me (once you’ve booted up it doesn’t really matter?!), it does relate to the general speed of the system post boot-up.
I was a little worried to begin with – the Force 3 has been given some bad press due to some bad firmware. I haven’t experienced any of the extensivley described issues that are sprawled all over the internet, so I can only assume that the firmware has been fixed, and people experiencing issues are either using drives with the older firmware, or are having more isolated problems.
With the old 5400RPM hard drive (which I have now put inside a USB enclosure), there was a delay between pushing the pause key (F8) and iTunes actually pausing – with the Force 3, there is no such delay. I am assuming that this increase in snappiness is down to the SSD rather than the RAM upgrade… but I’m fairly sure that I am correct!