MacBook Pro 4,1 and best SSD?

Samsung 830 and 840 Pro are both reliable,but the 830 is a bit cheaper. It will be about $200 on Amazon, or a little more for the 840 Pro.

Just checked: $170 for 830, $230 for 840 Pro.

 

For a 4,1, get the Crucial m4. In addition to decent reliability, you also gain the ability to update the firmware from within OS X, instead of having to boot into Windows to do so.

 

I agree.

 

Also bear in mind that SATA 2 vs. SATA 3 is mainly about the maximum data transfer speed. This is important for:

(a) Bragging rights.
(b) People who want to edit professional, raw high-definition video.

For general use, however, you'll rarely get anywhere near that limit. The main advantage of SSD for most people is that because there are no physical read/write heads whanging around, the "seek time" of any half-decent SSD is vastly quicker than a mechanical drive. Because a modern OS is continually accessing files all over the drive, this really puts a bomb behind boot times, application startup and virtual memory.

Reviews and blogs tend to get a bit over-obsessed with peak data rates.

 

Yes if will work. I've used the same one.

 

Yes because Parallels is Windows.

 

Actually, I'm quite sure the firmware updates can only be done via bootcamp.

 

Ahh, my mistake. See this thread:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1328742

OP, it has to be bootcamp.