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Buying Haswell 13. Should I pay $300 more for 512GB or get an external hd?

G

GP20

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 3, 2012
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Originally, I was going to get the $1499 rMBP13 2.4Ghz/8GB/256GB, and also get a 1TB USB3 external hard-drive. I'm planning on keeping the rMBP for at least 4~5 years. I'll only take the rMBP out of home maybe 1~2 times a week.

But I've been thinking if it would be worth it to pay $300 extra for the 512GB model, which would also include the 2.6Ghz processor (which I don't really need). The benefits are of course the extremely fast ePCI read/write speeds, and that I could potentially not have to carry an external hd all the time. Downside is, well, $300 (minus the cost of the 1TB USB3 drive which is more or less around $100). The external hd would of course not be SSD, and would have much slower read/write speeds.

Has anyone lived with always carrying an external USB drive for a few years? How fast are the external hd's these days?

I'd appreciate your comments. Thanks!
 
I'd definitely go for the bigger SSD. You don't want to schlep around an external drive. Well, I would never want to. But if you want to, that's up to you.
 
GP20 said:
Originally, I was going to get the $1499 rMBP13 2.4Ghz/8GB/256GB, and also get a 1TB USB3 external hard-drive. I'm planning on keeping the rMBP for at least 4~5 years. I'll only take the rMBP out of home maybe 1~2 times a week.

But I've been thinking if it would be worth it to pay $300 extra for the 512GB model, which would also include the 2.6Ghz processor (which I don't really need). The benefits are of course the extremely fast ePCI read/write speeds, and that I could potentially not have to carry an external hd all the time. Downside is, well, $300 (minus the cost of the 1TB USB3 drive which is more or less around $100). The external hd would of course not be SSD, and would have much slower read/write speeds.

Has anyone lived with always carrying an external USB drive for a few years? How fast are the external hd's these days?

I'd appreciate your comments. Thanks!
Click to expand...

Depends how much personal data/media you have. For me, if I were to fit everything (movies, music, documents, ISOs of programs/discs/games), it'll take about 740GB. 1TB SSD is definitely too expensive, and even if I were to get the 512gb, I STILL would have to use an external drive to store everything. Since I still won't be external HDD independent with a 512gb ssd, I opted for the 256gb version. I'll be storing movies/ISOs etc. on the external, and documents/music etc. on both the internal SSD and backed up on the external.
 
If you want to keep the machine for 4-5 years, I'd go with 512GB, but that really depends on what you store on it, what you would put on an external drive, and how often you are moving the computer, even in your house. If the answer to the last question is: a lot, and I want to move the external with it, then schlepping around an external drive is going to get old quick. But if you are just offloading files you don't really need, and have no problem just disconnecting the drive when you move the laptop, then aside from the "hassle" of remembering to eject the disk, not big deal (and you get lots, and lots of HD space, even a RAID 1, for not much money).
 
With USB3 and TB, external HDD is about as fast as the internal HDDs.

While it's nice to have bigger storage, ask yourself this question, "Do I really need that much space?"

As for me, I get by fine with just 128GB, I have a 3TB NAS at home, 500GB and 2TB portable hard drive.
 
Thanks for the quick replies!:D I should've mentioned that I currently have a 2009 Dell Studio 15.4" (LOL I know) with 512GB hard-disk, with usually about 20~30GB of space leff. I do have a 2TB desktop external hard-drive (way too big to carry around, of course) at home, and I off-load files as needed. I just have a lot of movies and photos/videos on my Dell now; do I must have them on the laptop all the time? No, but it was nice having access to them when I wanted.
 
If I carried everything with me, I'd need a 13 TB internal drive.

Instead I have the minimum available 128 GB on my MBA and 256 on my MBP. And for both I have 64GB of extra storage - on a Nifty drive for the MBP and a tiny flash drive for the MBA.

Decide what you need with you all the time and how much space it takes up. You can still get an external drive for the rest, but the idea is that you'll only need it rarely.
 
I'd get the 128, and use the extra cash on an AC wifi router to set up a NAS with an external drive :)
 
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