Formatted Capacity Out the Box of 13" MacBook Pro Retina PCIe 1TB SSD

buckeyegoose said:

All,

To those of you that have recently purchased a 13" rMBP with the 1TB PCIe upgrade, could you please tell me what the "formatted capacity" was out the box and the usable space was (what came pre-loaded out the box).

I'm contemplating purchasing one with that upgrade as well as the 8GB memory (don't see a need for 16GB), so if you have just 8GB let me kow if you see any performance slowdowns because of it and what if any apps/software did that happen in.

Thank You.

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I don't remember what my 1TB had free, but I would guess it would have had about 970-990GB free. If you getting that much space and you consider that you should keep 10-20% free for performance reasons, I don't really see how much is on it out of the box to be a big deal.

The amount of RAM that you need totally depends on what you do and how long you want to keep the computer.

buckeyegoose said:

All,


I'm contemplating purchasing one with that upgrade as well as the 8GB memory (don't see a need for 16GB), so if you have just 8GB let me kow if you see any performance slowdowns because of it and what if any apps/software did that happen in.

Thank You.

Click to expand...

You'll only see slowdowns if you're dealing with a huge image in Photoshop, or if you're attempting to run a VM with 4GB of RAM assigned to it, or 2 VMs with 2GB assigned to each.

buckeyegoose said:

I ask to know what usable space i have, if formatted space is only 990GB and then the OS takes up 20GB, you really only bought a 970GB drive.

I asked about RAM simply because of the stated performance boost with PCIe storage vs SATA. With SATA 16GB would of made a difference while with PCIe i don't know if 16GB v 8GB would make a difference like it does in Windos OS SATA world. I havent owned a MBP in awile (2 years) so I'm basing it from performance back then where RAM and HDD RPM meant something.

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RAM is still way, way faster then PCIe SSDs.

What do you want to do with your computer and how long do you want to keep it?

buckeyegoose said:

I ask to know what usable space i have, if formatted space is only 990GB and then the OS takes up 20GB, you really only bought a 970GB drive.

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Facepalm! Go and argue with Ford too, because you can't run the fuel tank absolutely dry I'm sure they mis-quote the tank capacity too....and it equally makes no real-world difference.

Go fill your hard-drive to 100% and see how usable a system that is...

So good news, your 1TB drive is actually an 850GB drive because formatting takes some, the OS takes some and you should leave some empty just so the systems can work.

The range of opinion as to how much you should leave free is greater than the formatting loss and the amount taken up by the OS. (some say 10%, some 15%)

buckeyegoose said:

I ask to know what usable space i have, if formatted space is only 990GB and then the OS takes up 20GB, you really only bought a 970GB drive.

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No you didn't because its not the drive makers fault you use an OS that consumes 20GB. Go and download a small version of linux. Does that mean you have really only bought a 985GB drive if you suddenly started using Fedora or something.

The drive's capacity is set, how you use it, is your decision.