I'm a new mac user as well and I just got my 15 mbp less than a week ago. I opted for the seagate xt hybrid drive instead of ssd. I can't recommend any ssds but I do want to share my experience with you for swapping out your hdd if you decide to change it out. My mbp came with lion preinstalled so the first thing I did was download the recovery tool that apple released to create a usb recovery partition. Here are some tips that I learned the hard way. Now maybe this is basic to experienced mac users, but being a noob to macs (not PCs) I wanted to share as I've noticed a lot of new mac users recently that were interested in swapping their hods.
***this is only for mbp that shipped with lion - it could work for ones that shipped with SL but I'm not sure and cannot confirm. ***
1. Download lion recovery tool
2. Make sure to erase the usb thumb drive in disk utility and format it for mac os extended (journaled) and set it to GUID. Since I was a PC user, my thumb drive was set for MBR and the recovery utility did not automatically set it to GUID.
3. After replacing the drive, plug in the usb drive and hold down OPTION key as soon as you power on.
4. You will see the usb recovery icon show up on the screen and choose that to enter recovery.
5. This is very important, go to disk utility and erase the new hdd with mac os extended (journaled) and choose GUID.
6. After that, go back and choose reinstall lion option and after a few prompts it should start downloading automatically.
I've read a lot of different tutorials online and most of them are for users who downloaded from the app store so I don't know if it's the same process but I just wanted to share my experience and hopefully prevent new users from going through the same issues I did.
