Are solid-state drives faster than hard disk drives? Or no?

[omgwut]

I'm looking at the specs page for the MacBook Pro and it reads this...

Your MacBook Pro comes standard with a 5400-rpm Serial ATA hard drive. Choose a hard drive with a faster speed for greater performance. Or you can choose a solid-state drive that offers enhanced durability.

Basically suggesting that the HDD option has a performance advantage over the SSD, but is this the case? I always thought SSDs could read & write quicker because they use solid-state flash memory as opposed to hard disks.

I want to go with the 256GB SSD but I want to know how it ranks in speed.

Thanks!

 

[thegoldenmackid]

The SSD's are obviously faster...

Here is a comparison idea...

 

[omgwut]

The SSD's are obviously faster...

Here is a comparison idea...

Holy crap, 40k RPM!!! Is that equivalent to the SSD speeds in Apple's drives? The store page doesn't say.

 

[devburke]

By "a hard drive with faster speed" it's referring to things like 5400 rpm HDDs vs. 7200 rpm HDDs, but has nothing to do with SSDs.

 

[NathanCH]

There are a ton of fun videos to watch on youtube. Just search for SSD. Unfortunately, most people only record their boot up times, which honestly, I don't give a crap about nor should anyone.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ssd+speed+mac&search_type=&aq=f

 

[Olivier L.]

Wikipedia would be a good start, showing some advantages and disadvantages of SSD vs others.

 

[stridemat]

If you are thinking about an SSD buy one for a little more money, such as the intel or the vertex. These, when compared to standard hard drives are unbelievably fast and the manufactures have worked out most the bugs with the firmware.

 

[devburke]

They’re better, but I still can’t justify spending the money on them till the prices come down. Just look at this:

 

[BlueRevolution]

Well, I would never buy any sort of hardware upgrade from Apple anyway. I don't think you should be relying on them for a realistic idea of how much something costs.

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=636&name=Solid-State-Disks

 

[mreg376]

Well, I would never buy any sort of hardware upgrade from Apple anyway. I don't think you should be relying on them for a realistic idea of how much something costs.

True, but not many people want to start swapping drives in and out of their brand new MBP, reinstalling OSX, etc. Not a fun way to begin with a new machine. It's not like adding RAM.

 

[BlueRevolution]

The first thing I do when I get a new Mac is reinstall the OS to get rid of the gigabytes of trash that comes preinstalled, including iLife, language localizations, and printer drivers.

 

[CountBrass]

Well, I would never buy any sort of hardware upgrade from Apple anyway. I don't think you should be relying on them for a realistic idea of how much something costs.

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=636&name=Solid-State-Disks

Don't know about the US but in the UK the cost to add a 256GB SSD to a Mac Pro is about the same as the retail price (www.overclockers.co.uk) so I'm paying the cost of the replaced drive to have Apple install the SSD. Sounds like a good deal to me.