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Buy 2T SSD drive or a new laptop?

H

hajime

macrumors G3
Original poster
Jul 23, 2007
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Hello, the 1T SSD in my MacBook Pro 2010 17" is running out of disk space. I am running both Bootcamp Windows and Mac OS. Replacing it with a 2T Samsung EVO will cost about $1K. The computer is mostly still functioning except that scrolling in browsers and pdf documents sometimes do not work, it cannot connect to a 4K display (I am planning to buy a 43" LG display rather than two 27-32" monitors), the screws at the base keep falling out, often very very hot at the base, heavy, etc. The keyboard and screen size are nice.

The keyboard in the new MBP is not my cup of tea and it does not have Nvidia GPU for CUDA computations. Given these two reasons, I cannot justify to pay high price to get the 2017 MBP. Besides, I also plan to build a high-end desktop computer with 1-4 GPUs and 64-128GB RAM in the near future. It is going to be expensive.

What suggestions do you have?
 
Remove the CD drive and put a 5TB HDD in that spot, keep your 1TB drive as the boot drive and put all of your other files on the external.

For $1000, you could do that while also upgrading to a late 2011 final 17" edition...
 
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I 2nd haters comment.

I got a 2010 macbook with ssd primary drive and bined the optical and fitted a hdd.
my home folder is on the hdd with everything else on the ssd.
 
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Thanks Hater and elf69. That is a good idea.

Now I remember that I have an extra Samsung 850 EVO SSD. Can I swap it with the internal CD drive?

I recall that superdrive is not compatible with older MBP such as the 2010's. What can we do if we need to use a CD/DVD drive?
 
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Is the Samsung EVO the only option you're consider? I've been eyeing a Crucial MX300 2TB SSD ($549 on Newegg) to replace a 2TB HDD in my wife's 2011 MBP. She wants a smaller/lighter laptop, though, so may just end up pushing more of her data into iCloud (mainly photos/video) for use with a laptop that has 256GB or 512GB, with our iMac having the full set of her data locally (I wouldn't want it only in the cloud).

Another option is to do an optical drive swap (replace optical drive with a 2.5" drive) to give you more data storage. If using a HDD, this will be cheaper. I tried to do this on a 2009 17" MBP, but it didn't work for me and ended up being a big waste of time, but I know other people have had success and I may have just had a bad adapter. If I was doing this today, I'd use a 5TB HDD as my second drive.
 
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I bought the EVOs 1.5 years ago when the Crucial were out of stock. I shall also consider it given the low cost. Unfortunately, it is also out of stock as of now.

I know that there is no point using faster drives on the 2010. I guess when I am finished with the MBP 2010 17", I just take out the drives and use them as external drives for faster laptop. Given this plan, shall I go for ones with faster interface?

Are HDs heavier than SSDs?
 
I got a 2010 macbook (A1342) with 240GB ADATA SSD and a 250GB HDD in optical bay.
I bought kit from ebay had the optical bay adaptor to fit the HDD and also a caddie to make the original optical a usb drive!
 
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nilk said:
Is the Samsung EVO the only option you're consider? I've been eyeing a Crucial MX300 2TB SSD ($549 on Newegg) to replace a 2TB HDD in my wife's 2011 MBP. She wants a smaller/lighter laptop, though, so may just end up pushing more of her data into iCloud (mainly photos/video) for use with a laptop that has 256GB or 512GB, with our iMac having the full set of her data locally (I wouldn't want it only in the cloud).

Another option is to do an optical drive swap (replace optical drive with a 2.5" drive) to give you more data storage. If using a HDD, this will be cheaper. I tried to do this on a 2009 17" MBP, but it didn't work for me and ended up being a big waste of time, but I know other people have had success and I may have just had a bad adapter. If I was doing this today, I'd use a 5TB HDD as my second drive.
Click to expand...

When I was in a similar situation for my 2009 17" MBP, I successfully replaced my 1 TB EVO with a 2 TB EVO in the HDD bay, leaving the optical drive intact. MicroCenter had the best price at the time.

I'm very dissatisfied with Apple's lack of ports, the bad keyboard (for typists), and the unnecessary higher prices on the recent MBP's, so am planning to settle for a 2014 or 2015 15" MBP with 1 TB from Craigslist, and occasionally use an external 1 TB SSD to accommodate downsizing from my laptop SSD which has 1.3 TB used. I sincerely hope Apple comes to their senses soon and delivers a true "Professional" laptop for developers and other professionals with better compute speed, more memory, tons of disk space, and dongle-less usable ports. Nearly no one is asking for thinner laptops or thinner phones, but nearly everyone needs better battery life.
 
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Forum-User said:
When I was in a similar situation for my 2009 17" MBP, I successfully replaced my 1 TB EVO with a 2 TB EVO in the HDD bay, leaving the optical drive intact. MicroCenter had the best price at the time.

I'm very dissatisfied with Apple's lack of ports, the bad keyboard (for typists), and the unnecessary higher prices on the recent MBP's, so am planning to settle for a 2014 or 2015 15" MBP with 1 TB from Craigslist, and occasionally use an external 1 TB SSD to accommodate downsizing from my laptop SSD which has 1.3 TB used. I sincerely hope Apple comes to their senses soon and delivers a true "Professional" laptop for developers and other professionals with better compute speed, more memory, tons of disk space, and dongle-less usable ports. Nearly no one is asking for thinner laptops or thinner phones, but nearly everyone needs better battery life.
Click to expand...

Agreed. My work machine is a 2012 15" rMBP with max specs. I absolutely love this machine, the best laptop I've ever used, and I wish Apple had just iterated on this design instead of what we're getting now. I'm due for a new work machine and ask my employer for a new one, but I'm just staying put for now. The thing that really disappoints me is the TouchBar, which brings me no benefit, while taking away function keys that I rely on (I'm a touch typist and a software dev). Hopefully we get a higher-speced non-touch bar 15" by the time 32GB RAM arrives.
 
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I succeed in replacing the CD drive with another Samsung EVO SSD. I can also do triple boot on my Mac. Thank you all of you.
 
More storage for less money...sounds better.... as a cost of speed.. AT the end of the day, u may have 2TB SSD, but your still gonna have to use spinning drives anyway for backup...

Better to have small SSD 128 or 256Gig as boot drive only
 
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