I recently took it upon myself to beef up my 2011 Macbook Pro.
This laptop originally came with 4 GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive. And it served me perfectly fine for awhile.
After awhile, however, I started to become more aware of the speed. My usual activity with the laptop was perfectly fine, however I could feel it choking a bit when I had a lot of simultaneous things happening at the same time. This got me thinking about doing a memory upgrade. Memory is insanely cheap these days anyway.
As I continued to look into it, however, I realized that I wasn’t going to see a major speed bump with this laptop unless I replaced the hard drive. In fact, that is the case with MOST computers these days. The bottleneck to performance is very often the hard drive itself. My desktop computer has an SSD drive in it and I know just how snappy the things are.
So, I headed on over to MacSales.com and bought 12 GB of memory and an OWC 240GB Mercury Electra 6G SSD drive.
And, like a good little nerd, I recorded the process and made a video. 
This video will show you how to perform this upgrade on a Macbook Pro.
Now, this video would have shown the hard drive preparation process as well, but I began having mic issues. However, here it is in short:
- BEFORE I took the laptop apart, I did a full clone of the old hard drive onto an external Firewire drive. For this, I used Carbon Copy Cloner.
- I then did the upgrade as shown above.
- When complete, I booted the laptop using the cloned image from the external drive. To do this, I held down the OPTION key while I turned it on and I held the key down until the startup manager came up. I then selected my external drive and booted the machine.
- From there, I opened up Disk Utility and I partitioned the new SSD drive. I simply set up a single partition. I then did a quick format on the drive, just for good measure.
- I then used Carbon Copy Cloner again to re-clone the external drive to the SSD drive.
- When it was done, I turned everything off, unplugged the external, then rebooted normally. Only this time, it booted from the SSD automatically.
Booyah. Major speed increase.
The ONLY negative I’ve seen so far, and I just haven’t yet looked into it, is that the computer does seem to draw the battery down quicker than it used to. Not a lot, but some. I don’t know if this is normal. A quick search around sees a lot of people speculating that it wouldn’t draw more power, but few actually reporting real-world results. Well, my own real-world result is that it DOES draw more power. Not enough to be a bother, but it is noticeable.
Overall, really happy with the upgrade.
Oh, and for you PC people, I bet you could do the very same upgrade and get the same results. Hardware is hardware, after all. It isn’t much different just because it has a picture of fruit on the lid. 
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