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MBP Retina - enough storage?

patseguin

patseguin

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Aug 28, 2003
1,735
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The new MBP Retina has caught my eye as I use my MBP for music production and also at gigs. However, is the 256GB HD on the stock model really enough? The upgrades are way out of my price range and if the stock config was enough to handle my Logic Pro work and store my iTunes library for backing tracks I might pull the trigger.
 
patseguin said:
The new MBP Retina has caught my eye as I use my MBP for music production and also at gigs. However, is the 256GB HD on the stock model really enough? The upgrades are way out of my price range and if the stock config was enough to handle my Logic Pro work and store my iTunes library for backing tracks I might pull the trigger.
Click to expand...

I went with 512 for apps. some movies.. some mp3s.. and had 128 MBA fill up way to fast.. so knew 256 wouldn't last three years for me..
 
patseguin said:
The new MBP Retina has caught my eye as I use my MBP for music production and also at gigs. However, is the 256GB HD on the stock model really enough? The upgrades are way out of my price range and if the stock config was enough to handle my Logic Pro work and store my iTunes library for backing tracks I might pull the trigger.
Click to expand...

To be perfectly honest, 256GB is a awfully small drive for what you intend to use it for. Sure there are external solutions that you could implement, however it's a compromise at best and one that is not a great idea. The time, money and potential frustration would most probably put you off.

I hate that Apple is so obsessed with profit, they overcharge wildly for the upgrades. There's a much more reasonable alternative... and that would be for them to halve, the markup.

They would still make a big profit, perhaps far more than now, since more buyers would choose to select the upgrades from Apple, instead of passing because they are obscenely overpriced.

There's quite a difference between price gouging, and a fair markup which would facilitate more buyers choosing to buy more options from Apple.
 
patseguin said:
The new MBP Retina has caught my eye as I use my MBP for music production and also at gigs. However, is the 256GB HD on the stock model really enough? The upgrades are way out of my price range and if the stock config was enough to handle my Logic Pro work and store my iTunes library for backing tracks I might pull the trigger.
Click to expand...

My view is that 512GB is tight for a laptop particularly one that may be your main machine. 256 would definitely not be enough for someone using it the way you are. The SSD component certainly causes issues not least because of the price...
 
everyone is different, I could not be happy with less than 500GB heck even at that i would have to make decissions on what to store externally on a drive I like the comfort to know I can carry all my music, movies and photos with me without having to decide.
 
Need to give more of a feel for the number gigabytes involved in your various libraries for us to be able to help you
 
i had the same problem with you, went for 256gb

first, itunes match saves me 150gb music, all work fine cuz i have internet everywhere, some songs i have them inside but its a gig or two.

Movies, and pictures, all in a 3.0hdd i have and it works great.

thats all, im very happy about it, in fact i have a 100gb partition for playing battlefield and lol, and got 40gb free in mac and 30gb in windows
 
patseguin said:
The new MBP Retina has caught my eye as I use my MBP for music production and also at gigs. However, is the 256GB HD on the stock model really enough? The upgrades are way out of my price range and if the stock config was enough to handle my Logic Pro work and store my iTunes library for backing tracks I might pull the trigger.
Click to expand...

its $500 for the 512GB ssd.

http://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-2-5-I...=1343923717&sr=8-2&keywords=samsung+830+512gb

That's the hard drive you get when you upgrade to 512GB. So it's $50 cheaper to upgrade than to actually buy the drive. Why does everyone seem to think apple is trying to rip everyone off?
 
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When it first come out, I wanted to buy 256GB model for long time, but if you use it for few years time and don't want to carry ext hdd outside. You better be off with high end model.
 
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Go with the 512 GB internal SSD drive, it should store as much music as you need in iTunes. For your working files, I would get an external Thunderbolt drive, either a single or RAID configuration based on how much speed you need. Fast RAID if you're editing video, probably a single drive is fine for audio stuff. That will give you the best of both worlds - fast SSD drive for your applications and OS, more external storage for your working files.

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gentlefury said:
but you can't so in this made up world where its somehow a rip off to pay $500 to upgrade to a $550 drive we all win!
Click to expand...

To some people, Apple will always look like a rip-off. I'm quite pleased with the options available for the RMBP.
 
Thats why i'm glad they have both thunderbolt and USB 3.0, you have great options for external storage, and 256GB should be enough for all your personal files.

Though i went with 768 GB since i just need as much SSD inside as possible, yet i still think about going with a 3GB USB 3.0 :)
 
Music production? I sure hope you're producing in a lossless audio format. And if you are, it'd be a wise move to save up a bit more so you can get that bigger internal drive.
 
I would not invest in large internal SSD unless you need to have that storage from the desktop. I have max SSD to collect photos the field. After post processing, the photos will be moved to my library in an external RAID 1 set.
 
gentlefury said:
but you can't so in this made up world where its somehow a rip off to pay $500 to upgrade to a $550 drive we all win!
Click to expand...

SSDs cost approximately $1 per GB now. The poster's point was that the 256 GB SSD in the base rMBP accounts for ~$250 of the machine's cost. A 512 GB SSD costs ~$500, which is $250 more than the cost of the 256 GB SSD. Therefore, upgrading to a 512 GB SSD should be a $250 premium, not a $500 premium, because you aren't getting the 256 GB SSD in addition to the 512 GB SSD. Alternatively, you can't buy the base model, pop out the 256 GB SSD, sell it for $200 or whatever, and pop in a 512 GB SSD for $550, for an upgrade difference of $350.

Of course, that's not how pricing works. Neither Apple nor any other product manufacturer adds a flat percentage profit markup to each individual component and then totals them up. Apple is probably making a higher profit margin on the conventional MBPs than on the rMBP, if you include R&D costs, so they get some of their overall margin back by charging more for SSD upgrades and such. Saying that Apple charges "too much" is simplistic, because it assumes that Apple would be the same company, would attract the same types of employees, and would create the same innovative poducts if they weren't so "greedy" and just settled for the same lower profit margins of other companies. But that's another topic, and it's been debated here many times.
 
upgrades soon

I think we'll see some SSD upgrades in the not too distant future, from OTC and others.
 
I took a different path as far as storage went. Instead of upgrading to the rMBP with a 512GB SSD, I picked up a 1.5TB Seagate GoFlex drive and the Thunderbolt adapter. So for a total of $220, I more than tripled the storage of the $2799 model with comparable speeds. (This was also significantly cheaper than buying any of the thunderbolt drives, oddly enough).
 
I suggest investing around $300 on a good external Thunderbolt drive, and keep the 256Gb config. Still if you spend the $500 on the 512Gb or even the $1,000 on the 768Gb it will stay very short for what you use it for.
 
Thinking about picking up a rMBP myself. Has anyone thought of or tried a NAS solution? Map the network drive and have it where ever you go
 
Diseal3 said:
Thinking about picking up a rMBP myself. Has anyone thought of or tried a NAS solution? Map the network drive and have it where ever you go
Click to expand...

I love NAS storage if I'm on the same network, but from a remote network - usually broadband - it can be hit or miss unless you are using a VPN and have all of the proper ports open or forwarded from the router. This requires a level of network control you may not have while traveling. Also, remote transfers are pretty slow compared to local storage.
 
Just an addendum to my earlier post:

I am using the external drive to store my iTunes library, my iPhoto/Aperture libraries, as well as other software. The Seagate drives come preformatted with NTFS, but also come with the Paragon NTFS driver to allow full read/write access to/from the drive in OS X. This means I can have one set of data, and access it either from OS X or my Bootcamp partition. I also am using the external drive to install a lot of my Windows software, since I made the Bootcamp partition as small as possible. Speedwise, my drive over Thunderbolt is comparable to the internal SSD (not quite as fast, but definitely faster than the HDD in my 2011 MBP).
 
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