Really, the hardest part of the whole thing was tracking down a size 6T torx-head screwdriver for the four torx screws that help hold the hard drive in place. The whole procedure took less than an hour (not counting the half a day it took to clone my MacBook's hard drive to the SSD). I replaced my 2011-era MacBook Pro's 500GB hard drive with the 500GB Samsung 850 Evo. And they aren't nearly as costly per gigabyte as they once were. They are more energy efficient, more reliable and quieter than hard drives with magnetic, spinning disks. There's a reason that all modern MacBooks and the vast majority of all laptops sold today use SSDs.
If you have an old MacBook Pro with one foot in the grave, the single best thing you can do to breathe new life into it is replace its traditional spinning hard drive with a solid-state drive.
