Upgrading a Mid 2009 MacBook to 8Gb RAM
geek, mac October 23rd, 2011Some time ago I bought a little 13″ white MacBook of the “Mid 2009″ MC240LL/A (MacBook5,2) variety that, according to the specifications, was already at its maximum supported memory configuration of 4Gb. However, after reading about a firmware update that somehow magically enabled greater memory capacity, I decided to try it for myself.
I purchased 2 x 4Gb DDR2-800 (PC2-6400) SO-DIMM Kit (Corsair Value Select VS8GSDSKIT800D2) and installed them in place of the previous 2 x 2Gb units. The machine booted first time perfectly happily with 8Gb RAM in use. Success!
Mid 2009 MacBook with 8Gb RAM
I’d also read that some machines would boot with this much memory but suffer a performance decrease, so I took the precaution of taking benchmarks before and after the upgrade. Fortunately, these benchmarks actually showed a decent performance gain of around 8% overall.
The key, it seems, is to have the correct version of the Boot ROM and SMC firmware.
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As shown above, my machine is running version MB52.0088.B06 and 1.38f5 respectively – which can be downloaded for free from the Apple Support site.
This little hack worked well for me, but as ever with these things, your mileage may vary. I don’t know if there are specific (unlabeled) revisions of the hardware that will or won’t support this much memory, or support it but suffer performance degradation or other problems. Caveat Reader.
However, I can confirm it is actually possible for at least one MacBook.
1 votes, average: 5.00
John Girvin is a software engineer, sci-fi buff, cyclist and retrocomputer fan (ie: nerd) from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
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October 25th, 2011 at 9:25 pm
I’ve a little black MacBook that just might benefit from the same hack.
It originally came with 2 Gb of RAM and was upgraded to 4 almost immediately, although I think I may have bought it in 2008. To my knowledge it was the last black one they made, so it shouldn’t be too hard to track down.
October 26th, 2011 at 10:02 pm
Finally got round to checking my MacBook. Turns out it’s an early 2008 model. The hack would have worked for a Late 2008 model. Although the 2.4GHz core 2 duo is one of the supported processors, this laptop is SMC rather than EFI (MacBook 4.1), and I’m already at the latest firmware version.
Given that I bought it in the USA when the exchange rate of $2 to the pound, I guess I shouldn’t feel too hard done by
December 13th, 2011 at 4:34 pm
This is a great way to future-proof these expensive Macs. I put a pair of 4GB modules (Corsair Value Select 1066MHz/PC-8500 DDR3) in my own mid-2009 aluminium MBP 5.5, along with an SSD and a hack to enable TRIM support for it.
For anyone looking to up theirs, make sure you get the 1066MHz modules, as there have been reports of f.ex the 1333MHz ones not working for some odd reason.
October 9th, 2012 at 2:34 pm
Hey there!
Thats great news – given the fact that I was told by the gravis-technicians-team (“Gravis” being the main mac-support stores in germany, where I bought my mac) that the white mid-2009 mac (5,2) would not take more RAM than 6 GB. How do the 8 GB of RAM work for you after one year in use? Any problems so far?
I find that all spec-data shown in your second screenshot match mine, up to the serial number (mine reads 45937J0D9GU) and the hardware UUID (mine reads 2E733FA1-935F-5AE7-92E0-775A2A5412C3). I compared our specs on the respective apple-sites (english and german), and the only difference is that my keaboard is ISO only. I presume that installing 8 GB in my machine will not cause any problems – or has anyone else experienced some?
October 14th, 2012 at 11:11 pm
I haven’t had any problems!
November 21st, 2012 at 2:06 pm
So you would think this could/would and most probably will work for a late 2009 macbook. It runs 1067 MHz DDR3 memory would this make any difference?
November 21st, 2012 at 2:31 pm
Unfortunately I don’t know about other models of MacBook, sorry. An easy way to check is to find your particular model on crucial.com and see what upgrades are listed for it.
More memory is always good
November 24th, 2012 at 10:31 pm
Go ahead with your late 2009 MacBook and upgrade to 2 x 1066MHz 4GB DDR3′s. I’ve just done mine today and I’m enjoying faster application opening / closing times and even, it seems, surfing!