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How do you survive?

ThirtyThr33

ThirtyThr33

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 13, 2011
278
1
Boulder, Colorado
I'm wondering how so many people are living with only 128gb of memory on their MBPs. I am aware of the data doubler but for some reason I feel taking out the cd drive and replacing it with a ssd would somehow corrupt the system or create problems in the future. I want a super fast ssd but the reasonable size (512gb) is almost the price of a new macbook and from what I have read they seem very unreliable. So I have seen people just dumping the 500gb 5000rpm hdd for a 128gb ssd. How do you live? I have close to a 100gb of music and movies and I feel like I'd fill it up really quick especially when it comes to pictures and such. I want the ssd for speed but the hdd for reliablity, what should I do?
 
Most of us can't "survive" it. Most of the people on here with a ~120GB SSD also have a secondary HDD in their system for media.
 
People tend to have an Optibay Drive (additional HDD that replaces the DVD drive) or an external HDD.

The advantage of the Optibay is the speed of the SATA port is equal to that of the standard SATA port used for the primary HDD/SSD. It's essentially having two hard drives in your computer. The disadvantage of the optibay is obviously the loss of the optical drive. It will also void the AppleCare warranty, although this issue can be avoided if you can carefully reinstall the original DVD drive before sending it to Apple.

External drives are the more traditional solution. While they tend to be slower due to the bus speed (USB or Firewire vs. SATA; 480mb/s or 3200mb/s vs. 3Gb/s), they tend to be fast enough to stream your traditional media, such as your music. With the 17" MacBook Pro, eSATA is an optional, and it is essentially equal to internal SATA. Finally, with Thunderbolt, if the specs are to be believed, it will be FASTER than internal SATA (10Gb/s).
 
I don't.

Optical bay. There's no other way to survive dude.

You can get an external, but I'm not sure if that will be as "comfortable."
 
Although I currently don't own a(n) SSD, the only significant files on my computer is my music collection amassing ~50GB.

Home folder is right around ~100 GB, including my music collection.
Applications is 10GB.
Dropbox is 2GB.
OS is what? 10GB maybe?

But a 120 GB HDD wouldn't leave much room for growth, and my 50GB Win7 partition isn't included. That'd be mandatory as some of the things I do for my degree are just easier to do on Windows.

That's my two cents. Basically the only thing that's stopping me from an SSD right now is the money to do so.
 
csjo00 said:
Although I currently don't own a(n) SSD, the only significant files on my computer is my music collection amassing ~50GB.

Home folder is right around ~100 GB, including my music collection.
Applications is 10GB.
Dropbox is 2GB.
OS is what? 10GB maybe?

But a 120 GB HDD wouldn't leave much room for growth, and my 50GB Win7 partition isn't included. That'd be mandatory as some of the things I do for my degree are just easier to do on Windows.

That's my two cents. Basically the only thing that's stopping me from an SSD right now is the money to do so.
Click to expand...

it's easy to live under 100GB.

i took all my music an excess files off my drive and put them into 1TB external hdd (1 in office / 1 in home) and uploaded important files onto cloud (sugarsync). files I modify each day get backed up on Time Machine (500GB external HDD) and cloud. i have less than 100 GB on my drive right now, and might get an SSD someday when I have time, money, and enough interest to mess around with it. I don't need SSD. my computer is plenty fast enough for me right now. but, I wouldn't mind having one. this is also good preparation for moving to mba someday :)
 
palpatine said:
it's easy to live under 100GB.

*wall of text*
Click to expand...

I never said it was difficult. I think a lot of that 100 GB is extra space due to my use of FileVault.

riptideMBP said:
it also helps if you only install what you need... without media my install is 12GB
Click to expand...

I hate to be *that guy*, but the OP asked how *you* survived. Not how to survive by keeping only OS files. In my opinion, my media files are necessary.
 
OneUp said:
Nas
Click to expand...

Hey, that actually is probably the best option I've heard so far. I think my dad has an extra 1tb nas drive too. The only issue would be setting it up in my dorm. That could be hard with all their LAN restrictions.

As for everyone else, I am nervous to do the dual HDD installation. I just have a bad feeling about it, and with my luck I'd probably screw up the entire machine installing it. And with lion not having a disk would make it harder to install as well. I guess I'm just going to have to wait til SSDs are better. This phase reminds me of the early days of mp3 players when a 512mb mp3 player was like 200 bucks. Can't wait til storage gets cheAp again.
 
ThirtyThr33 said:
Hey, that actually is probably the best option I've heard so far. I think my dad has an extra 1tb nas drive too. The only issue would be setting it up in my dorm. That could be hard with all their LAN restrictions.
Click to expand...

You can get external drives or enclosures that has USB (or FW) as well as an ethernet port. Use the USB (or FW) in your dorm and then NAS it up when your anywhere else if you want to.
 
If it's your only machine, it might be hard. But folks who also have a 2nd / desktop machine can easily leave their Itunes library and other media on there, and just copy what then need when travelling with the laptop.
 
My original plan was to go with a 128GB SSD in my new MBP and have everything on the NAS. I've got about 4TB of very fast RAIDZ storage on my network with all my films, photos, music etc. of which the important stuff gets backed-up to Crashplan in the cloud.

If I want music on the move it's on my iPhone and any photos are on Flickr.

In the end, I went for the 256GB SSD. I think I want to run bootcamp for some gaming so will need the extra space. It's expensive, but compared to the overall price of the machine, it's something like 20% extra cost for double the storage.

I'll see how much I use the superdrive - I suspect I probably never will, so will go with a hybrid like the momentus XT if I find the need for more storage on the laptop itself.
 
I use my computer for work and games, including windows I still have 50GB left on my SSD, Now I have a optimay for every.thing else
 
I think most people should be using external HD's at this point. The more and more data we save the more reason to back it up. Most of my data is media which is accessible from a network drive by any pc within range wifi. Why need to hog up your poor little MBP's HD?
 
kicko said:
I think most people should be using external HD's at this point. The more and more data we save the more reason to back it up. Most of my data is media which is accessible from a network drive by any pc within range wifi. Why need to hog up your poor little MBP's HD?
Click to expand...

exactly. no drive can hold all of my data anyhow (several terabytes worth) so i figure just keeping the minimum amount of stuff on my drive is the best way to go.
 
But external HDDs would get really annoying. Yeah it's good for backing up stuff, but I don't want to plug in a external HDD every time I downloadna song or want to add music to my iPod. I might just do the data doubler. However I'm still paranoid about it. It just seems like a bad idea when you start trying to do things that your Mac wasn't designed for. I don't wanna hose up my laptop as soon as I buy it ya know?
 
ThirtyThr33 said:
But external HDDs would get really annoying. Yeah it's good for backing up stuff, but I don't want to plug in a external HDD every time I downloadna song or want to add music to my iPod. I might just do the data doubler. However I'm still paranoid about it. It just seems like a bad idea when you start trying to do things that your Mac wasn't designed for. I don't wanna hose up my laptop as soon as I buy it ya know?
Click to expand...

These days, you can get a tiny external HDD that you can leave plugged into your USB/Firewire port, and leave it there.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/EliteALmini/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB

I'm sure if you're carrying a MacBook around you, you can carry a little HDD.
 
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