21.5" iMac, SSD or SATA drive?

[Dunmail]

This mainly on behalf of my wife who's looking at getting an iMac to replace her Windows laptop.

How noticeable is the speed difference between standard hard drive and the SSD drive? I know bootup time is quicker but mostly we let our machines hibernate rather than turn them off so that's not really an issue.

She'll probably run a VM as she's some work stuff that is Windows only but other than that she doesn't use her current machine for anything heavy duty like photo or video processing.

From other threads it seems like the 512Gb SSD would be the one to go for but given that it's an extra £400 ($600) here in the UK the extra speed of the SSD would have to be significant to justify it.

 

[yjchua95]

This mainly on behalf of my wife who's looking at getting an iMac to replace her Windows laptop.

How noticeable is the speed difference between standard hard drive and the SSD drive? I know bootup time is quicker but mostly we let our machines hibernate rather than turn them off so that's not really an issue.

She'll probably run a VM as she's some work stuff that is Windows only but other than that she doesn't use her current machine for anything heavy duty like photo or video processing.

From other threads it seems like the 512Gb SSD would be the one to go for but given that it's an extra £400 ($600) here in the UK the extra speed of the SSD would have to be significant to justify it.

For an extra 400 quid I'd immediately go for an SSD. I use an SSD myself in both my iMacs, and the performance gains compared to an RPM drive are immense.

Let me put it this way:
Read/write speeds of a 7200rpm drive are around 70-110 MB/s
Read/write speeds for a PCIe SSDs on Macs are around 650-730 MB/s

If you get the 15" rMBP with 1TB SSD, you get a 4-lane PCIe, hence getting read/writes that are well north of 1GB/s.

EDIT: For better comparison, a 7200rpm drive system takes 45 seconds to boot up. An SSD system takes 5 seconds.

 

[Dunmail]

Thanks for the info. It does bump the cost to £1550 which is a sizable chunk of cash I could probably justify the cost to myself but I'll see what she's willing to spend.

 

[yjchua95]

Thanks for the info. It does bump the cost to £1550 which is a sizable chunk of cash I could probably justify the cost to myself but I'll see what she's willing to spend.

You know, you could actually go to the education store and purchase it. Apple doesn't check whether you're a student or not to qualify for it I didn't have second thoughts in taking advantage of this loophole.