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500Gig ssd?

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bushman1

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 28, 2007
159
0
I am looking for a 500 gig drive for my mbp and i rely wanted to go with an ssd. I have seen 512Gig ssds and am wondering if anyone has found one to buy or a release date for them. I know 250gigs have gotten much cheeper so i looked into this
http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
to use 2 X 250 gig ssds. Dose anyone know if installing this voids your warranty. It seems like it would and their site doesn't say anything about it. I found it interesting that the bracket alone costs twice the price of most 500gig hdds. Also anyone using and ssd rely finde it better?
 
replacing your optic bay will void your warranty (though if you replace it with care, and if you have a problem you replace it back, you should not have trouble....)
On the other side if you can survive with 256Gb i'd strongly recommend that since the alternative will cost you WELL over $1000 (and nearly $2000 if you go for the intel and samsung drives) also (I dont know the new MBP) but older MBP had optic bay PATA interface, though you can get an adaptor Im pretty sure it will interfere with the RAID 0 config if you plan to do that...

I say be smart, get the smallest and cheapest one you could live with (I "upgraded" my 200GB hdd to a 128Gb ssd, im happy with it, I do have lots of external HDDs for all my sh8t) and in six month you will be able to buy 500GB for $500 or less.. (I hope)
 
bushman1 said:
I am looking for a 500 gig drive for my mbp and i rely wanted to go with an ssd. I have seen 512Gig ssds and am wondering if anyone has found one to buy or a release date for them. I know 250gigs have gotten much cheeper so i looked into this
http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
to use 2 X 250 gig ssds. Dose anyone know if installing this voids your warranty. It seems like it would and their site doesn't say anything about it. I found it interesting that the bracket alone costs twice the price of most 500gig hdds. Also anyone using and ssd rely finde it better?
Click to expand...

It voids the warranty but i've done it :D Theres no way Apple will know if your careful. I set up mine in a Software Raid arrangement, and its blisteringly fast,
 
I know A-data has an incredibly fast 512GB 2.5" SSD due soon, however, the cost hasn't been announced, and is expected to be outrageous (as in, more than the cost of the notebook itself).

250 or 256GB SSDs are the largest you can currently get at anywhere near reasonable prices. Even for those, the incredibly fast ones will run you $800 and up. Newegg now has the OCZ Vertex in stock... which has some outstanding early reviews... but it's $855 after rebate. And that's for 250GB. 500 or 512GB will cost you several times that for similar performance. Slower SSDs can, of course, be had for less than half that. But then, why not just get a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive? The cost to performance ratio would be FAR better.

And the unibody MBPs use SATA optical drives, just to clarify the other issue. You can certainly do the MCE optibay method with two SSDs, but is it really worth it?
 
why not just get a 500GB 7200rpm hard drive
Click to expand...
they are not nearly as fast as "regular" (not the intel and samsung, those are MUCH faster) SSD drives, they will make a lot of noise (you dont know how much noise your MBP does until you upgrade to SSD, TRUST ME!!! (in fact when I upgraded and made my internal HDD external, I quickly got tired of the noise of the external HDD (which used to be internal) and now I rarely mount it since it is REALLY annoying and its only 5400 RPM (hitachi something.) Also heat, ssd will shave at least two whole ºC of the 5400 HDD (which is also cooler than the 500GB HDD) also reliability, if he is asking for 500GB INTERNAL then probably is because he would be constantly moving his laptop (otherwise why bother and not buy a small SSD internal and put a couple of 2TB external HDD :D) and a portable laptop with a disk moving at 7200rpm inside is not a good mixture.
Other thing, current 500GB HDD (such as the momentus) are just as fast as regular desktop (3.5") HDD (probably a bit slower) in the otherside SSD are as good as top performance Desktop HDDs (such as WD Raptors, or 1~2TB HDD) and enven top performing SSD (e.g. intel) are much faster than those drives and sometimes as fast as some RAID 0 combinations of some of them, with, again, NONE of the heat or NOISE.

Again, if you can handle wit 128GB~256GB (and extra external storage) that would be the best choice.
 
The only issue i find with SSD drives is that the fuller they get the slower they get... My 500GB (raid) is nearly full now, and its running slower than my 7200 500GB, so i think they're good as long as you dont fill them over 75%. Its the same for individual 256GB's as well. Someone posted some benchmarks here showing the same thing.
 
kastenbrust said:
The only issue i find with SSD drives is that the fuller they get the slower they get... My 500GB (raid) is nearly full now, and its running slower than my 7200 500GB, so i think they're good as long as you dont fill them over 75%. Its the same for individual 256GB's as well. Someone posted some benchmarks here showing the same thing.
Click to expand...

Agree, also I think (for what I read) that MAC OS is particularly picky about free space (I have read some people claiming that it is good to have 20% or 30GB whatever is higher free) also if you run activity monitor and check virtual memory you going to see a lot of GBs used for virtual memory. I however have my system really clean since I rater have my data in external HDD to use it in different computers (and DVD players :D.)
 
bushman1 said:
I am looking for a 500 gig drive for my mbp and i rely wanted to go with an ssd. I have seen 512Gig ssds and am wondering if anyone has found one to buy or a release date for them. I know 250gigs have gotten much cheeper so i looked into this
http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/
to use 2 X 250 gig ssds. Dose anyone know if installing this voids your warranty. It seems like it would and their site doesn't say anything about it. I found it interesting that the bracket alone costs twice the price of most 500gig hdds. Also anyone using and ssd rely finde it better?
Click to expand...

Also for what I can understand you want a fast system and for what you described you are prepared to spend in the $2000 zone, if so why not stretch it a bit more and get the queen of the iMacs or a low powered (still much faster than the MBP with what you described) powermac?...
 
I will just get a sing 500 gig hdd. I can upgrade to an sdd after about a year one the prices fall even more and they rely live up to their potential. I do want to test osx 10.6 on an ssd though. Anyone know of a rely cheep one with minimal storage. I could just test it then return it but that seems risky and I could be out $800.
 
bushman1 said:
I will just get a sing 500 gig hdd. I can upgrade to an sdd after about a year one the prices fall even more and they rely live up to their potential. I do want to test osx 10.6 on an ssd though. Anyone know of a rely cheep one with minimal storage. I could just test it then return it but that seems risky and I could be out $800.
Click to expand...

Read my thread about my experience with a 128GB G.Skill titan.
I thought exacly what you said, i rather try a small one (in this case 128GB) to get an idea of what is all the fuzz about. and when I can get a 256~500GB for ~$300 then I upgrade.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/661948/

In this case is a 128 g.skill SSD drive, this is the cheapest 128GB drive I have seen ever (and the best is that is not the worse either :D) it is a great compromise between value (or whatever you want to call it) and performance. It cost only $220 (well "only" compared to $800+ intels and samsungs.) I truly recommend it to you if you can "survive" with internal capacity of around ~100GB (letting the other 20GB free for system use,) I also recomend in the tread an external enclosure for your internal HDD if you decide to go that road and show a video comparing before and after (remember this is a very cheap one, which is great because then you can safely assume that when you do decide to spend more money on a 256GB+ you will know for sure it will be much better than this drive, which it is good itself.

Anyway read it, and tell me what you think and decided. I bet that if you try it, you will not return it.....
 
Have to say I don't want to post a snow leopard video seems like it would attract apple attention. Maybe timing results
 
bossxii said:
I've been looking around at 256 gig SSD's ran across this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609379

I've seen some G Skill numbers here on other threadds but looks like this is under 500 bucks vs 900+ I've see on ebay for SSD's the same size. I know there is a range of different speeds, controllers etc... but just learning about what's worth doing right now.
Click to expand...

This one is much better and is only $40 more, and many people (including people in this forum) have bought them, I bought a cheap 128GB version of it for $200 and im VERY happy, system is like 300% faster and i cannot imagine how much better the TITAN 256gb is or how much better the intel and samsungs are...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231243
 
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