256GB ssd too small?

[KaraH]

It really all comes down to what you are using for. In general though I try to buy guessing what I will need 5 years from now rather than what I need today. Of course you can not predict future technology but you can at least take a guess.

Drives are one of those things where you can never get too big. Today we are measuring them in TB. A few years ago in GB. Awhile before that in MB. Back in the apple ][ days it was in KB. You can pretty much see the trend, even if you can not predict the exact years.

I ordered my machine yesterday and the specs are WAY beyond what I would need now. Just as the specs on my 2007 machine then were out there but now it is almost pokey for intensive tasks.

As a comparison to your question though I went for Apple's 3 TB hard drive. Then I added a 480 GB SSD from OWC as an external (512 - overprovisioning), a 4 TB thunderbolt drive for timemachine, and will do full backups on 4 TB drives using a voyager q.

 

[Chippy99]

It really all comes down to what you are using for. In general though I try to buy guessing what I will need 5 years from now rather than what I need today. Of course you can not predict future technology but you can at least take a guess.

It makes no sense imho to buy 5 years forward. Given the rate at which the price of SSD's has fallen and will continue to fall, to do so is just throwing money away.

For example, a 1TB SSD will almost certainly be sub $200 by then, perhaps even sub $100. Compared to $600 today. If you don't need 1TB today, or even in the medium term, it would make much more sense to start with a small SSD and upgrade it in say 3 years time.

I use the above just as an example, but it holds true for most computer components. Of course you have to balance the above with the disruption / hassle cost of upgrading. But on balance I would say looking 5 years out is too far unless you have money to burn.

50"+ OLED TV's will be the norm in 5 years, but very few people are buying them now at $10,000 when they will be sub $2,000 in 5 years.

 

[mrmarts]

To me it ain't worth hooking up a external drive to a iMac all the time. I find the WD My book slows my Macbook retina (which also has 256 SSD) down every time it accesses it and wakes it up. You are better to get a 3tb Fusion you will have plenty of storage and 128 ssd as well.

It also depends on your storage volume, my movies purchased from the iTunes store have exceeded 500gb so a 256 SSD will be pointless, if you got a large share of files get a fusion.

 

[Shivetya]

I decided to go with 512GB SSD, since I like to play games and I need some space to bootcamp, even though I can't know what the future holds.

This is my concern, plus with SSD over fusion Windows would benefit from the speed as well.

 

[KaraH]

It makes no sense imho to buy 5 years forward. Given the rate at which the price of SSD's has fallen and will continue to fall, to do so is just throwing money away.

Given that my average replacement time for my computers is a little more than 5 years actually it does make sense. Why would I be investing at all in my computer so close to EOL? I have used that logic with every computer I have bought since the early 80s and never regretted it.

It may not seem to make sense to fully load the cost upfront but I have to balance what to get now vs what to get later. Some things are more expensive in terms of lost productivity over time (hence why I get the fastest CPU and GPU available). The imacs being a closed environment limits upgrades somewhat too so I have to bear that in mind.

If I do have to upgrade my SSD I would go for something like OWC's viper. It is not released now but will be long before I need to make an upgrade decision.

 

[Arfdog]

It's all great for people how use enormous amounts of storage (I can't see how you would have 250GB of music, you can't listen to all of that right?) but I only need 128 for apps etc. and I need about 500GB of storage for some video-editing that I do. I don't like to manually fuss around with files and only have an external drive for back-up. The fusion 1TB seems perfect for me since I don't want all the hassle and basically I'm lazy (one of the reason's I like Apple). My only question is, does the HDD in the fusion makes noise? Or is it as quiet as the SSD. I'm not one of those people how put's their ear on the back and after that scream that it isn't silent, I just want to know if I would notice the difference if I'm working on my computer.

You sound like a normal person lol. You won't notice a thing with fusion. It's not dead silent but it's not readily noticeable either. Quietest computer ever, and I am not exaggerating

 

[richard13]

Given that my average replacement time for my computers is a little more than 5 years actually it does make sense. Why would I be investing at all in my computer so close to EOL? I have used that logic with every computer I have bought since the early 80s and never regretted it.

It may not seem to make sense to fully load the cost upfront but I have to balance what to get now vs what to get later. Some things are more expensive in terms of lost productivity over time (hence why I get the fastest CPU and GPU available). The imacs being a closed environment limits upgrades somewhat too so I have to bear that in mind.

If I do have to upgrade my SSD I would go for something like OWC's viper. It is not released now but will be long before I need to make an upgrade decision.

I agree. I always "max out" (in quotes because I don't always go for the tip-top) my computers. Why? Because I intent on keeping it for about 3 years and in, say, 2.5 years I still want it to have a decent amount of usefulness.

Other than storage, because you need more space, I think it's a waste to upgrade components. When I used to build my own PCs I would think how flexible everything was upgrade-wise but realistically if I wanted to upgrade my video card there was always a new standard which required a new motherboard which required a new CPU and/or memory. At that point I might as well just build a whole new one.

 

[haddy]

I would go either for a bigger SSD, because 256 isn't that much and when it comes to resale value I suspect it will be much lower, or for a 1TB Fusion as the speed in use will be pretty much the same as a 256GB SSD.

FWIW I am going to go for a 512SSD, so I don't have any moving parts.

It helps that I only have about 200GB of "main" data on my current iMac (a 640GB disk). I have a bunch of infrequently accessed files (such as videos, SD card backups, miscellany) on external drives that wouldn't fit in 768GB by a long way, and the extra price for that is way too much for me to stomach.

Well I have the 760GB SSD and use 219GB.....nothing flash just normal applications. All the files are on external drives. And I agree 256 isn't much!!

 

[StefanG]

I don't think there is realistically a way to answer the question if 256GB is enough or not. It all comes down to personal preferences, use cases and the amount of money people are willing to spent.

In the last 20 years I owned multiple custom build PC's and I upgraded components on the a regular base. Moving on to two MacBook Pro's and a iMac options to upgrade are quite limited. Considering the prices for upgrade parts like SSD's I don't think it is worth walking down this path. Upgrading internals is a no-go for me due to the impact on the warranty. I assume that some of the updates are not affecting the warranty if needed but I also guess that Apple is asking for the original parts to prove it.

SSD wise there are just three options available. 256GB, 512GB and 1TB. 256GB is probably enough for people not planning to run Windows via bootcamp or as VM in OS X. 512MB is already much better but people should ask themselves if it is enough for the next 3 years (extended warranty period). Based on my Windows experiences I believe that the bootcamp partition should be up to 256GB to cover the OS and a wider range of games. Without an option in-between I decided for myself to get the 768GB for the returned Ivy Bridge/1TB for the Haswell iMac. In this case I don't need to be worried about storage in the next couple of years for the scenarios I am planning to use the iMac.

All my data is located on a Synology NAS (8 x 3TB in RAID 6) and the most important data is also copied over to a 2TB USB 3.0 drive.

Again, this is just my way of answering the question....