Refresh Late 2008 Unibody MBP with SSD

So I've had my trusty first revision MBP for almost 2 years now and I've decided to refresh the internals.

- Battery is already down to 27% health with only 237 cycles. Only lasts about 50 mins. Will replace this later.
- Just ordered 8GB ram from newegg to replace my 2gb since it was getting way too slow with PS CS5, Lightroom 3, Chrome, iTunes, Adium, and Mail all open at the same time. Editing raw files in LR and 150mb files in CS5 mind you.

To my main question. I also want to add an SSD to it. I want to keep my current 500gb 5400rpm hitachi and put a SSD in place of my optical drive. I've read the guides and purchasing the optibay to put the ssd in the optical drive bay. My budget for this would be around $250. Could someone recommend the best and most reliable SSD in this range? I'm thinking it's going to be 128gb since 256gb is out of the range.

 

I would pick the OCZ Vertex 2. Any of the new ones with SATA3 will not run at SATA3 speeds on your revision of MBP. It is limited to SATA2.

As for RAM...I'm giving you a warning. I put 8 GB into my MBP of the same generation (except 2.53), and it was not stable. It would recognize it all, but too many of my applications were freezing all the time...even apps like Safari, iTunes, and even Firefox. Memtest resulted in many failed tests as well.

So I decided to put just 6 gb (4 gb stick and a 2 gb stick), and the problems went away. No more freezing of Safari or iTunes etc...

Not sure why this is but it is what I found and experienced first hand. I lost some good data because of the freezing so just be careful.

Also...I replaced my bard drive with the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. Got it on sale for $89 for the 500 GB version. Its pretty fast and enough for what I need. But my next MBP will definitely have an SSD.

 

I would avoid the OCZ Vertex 2 because when they made the move to 25nm the performance and space was reduced and they didn't change the sku's to indicate this. Yes you can exchange the drive with OCZ buy why put yourself through this process?

I would pick up a Crucial C300 128GB, it has been as low as $200 recently from newegg. Its sata III, but will still work fine and fast under sata II. You might also be able pick up a X25M G2 160GB in the $250 range. If you can find one in your price range I'd go that route as the extra 32GB would be nice and the performance is still good.

 

Never heard of the 8GB freezing issue. Anybody else have this problem? And i've read some bad things from newegg about the OCZ SSDs, mainly just if anything goes wrong they have bad customer support. Are kingston, crucial, or intel SSDs better?

 

If it is a Macbook Pro Unibody it should take 8gb ram just fine, but with the 08 non-unibody supposedly its 6gb max otherwise some people have had issues with using 8gb, like it freezing when addressing large chunks of ram or something.

 

I had the late 2008 MBP 2.53GHz and couldn't see 8GB. 6GB is max you can install.
As for the SSD, mine is Corsair 120GB with the sandforce

 

I'd go with the Intel - not the fastest specs but rock-solid reliability. I have one in my home desktop.