Late 2011 13" MBP performance declining - tips?

You still have a lean system with only 8 GB of RAM running a vey piggish RAM App Chrome! Every tab locks RAM space so the fewer tabs the better!

Your SSD is also lean! When the system doesn’t have physical RAM it uses the drive for Virtual RAM!

The general rule of thumb is to have 1/3 of the drive free for smaller drives so a 120 GB drive should have 40 GB of free space. You stated you only have 10 GB. So why does this matter? SSD’s need to apply wear leveling so the SSD’s cells are not over worn. So when you have very little space free on a boot drive you get a lot of churn! Which then does a few things it first creates excessive heat! As the CPU and the SSD need to move things about so the less worn areas are made available and as the system is busy doing this you are also trying to get more out of your system so its is slow!

So first thing I would do is boost the RAM up! IF you can get to 16 GB. Next, look at either off loading stuff you don’t need day to day to an external drive and/or look at getting a larger SSD.

We still have the elephant in the room! The HD SATA cable in this series also can be an issue in your performance. This is caused by wear on the cable from rubbing along the rough aluminum uppercase as well as having an old version of the cable which is not rated for the faster SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) drive you are likely using. The original HD Apple used in this series was only a SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) and the HD SATA cable originally was only rated for that drive.

Here’s a bit more on the subject Your Hard Drive Cable Is A Ticking Time Bomb

So besides putting down a strip of electricians tape on the upper case you want to replace the cable.

Here’s the cable: MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Mid 2012) Hard Drive Cable and Yes! this is the 2012 version which is the better one! And this is the guide you’ll need to follow MacBook Pro 13" Unibody Late 2011 Hard Drive Cable Replacement

There’s still one more piece to the puzzle! The cable needs to make some bends and people often crease the cable with a sharp crease which damages it! Instead find an old BIC ball point pen take the ink straw out and use it as a brake form to bend the cable so it has a nice arc around its radius where the cable needs to be bent.

Thats it!