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SSD Debate/rant

A

aoaaron

macrumors 6502
Original poster
How can people justify installing an SSD 128GB over either 750GB/500GB 7200 drives? This is after reading sooo many people hyping on and reccomending 128GB SSDs.

SSDs granted ARE amazing but if you're using your macbook pro as a primary device, you are going to need all the space you can get! this day in age, IMO 128GB is simply not enough. my PC ATM has in use around about 960GB in use of which 500GB of that is films/tvshows/music.

also SSDs ATM are so expensive that in a years time they will be bigger, better and CHEAPER.

technology ATM is at a point that for most users, whats offered will definitley be enough. its so frustrating to me (or maybe i am ignorant, please englighten me?) why users are splashing out on 8GB of RAM + SSDs when their described uses/needs won't warrant the outlay. I could understand a year later wanting a speed bump and installing an SSD then but people are spending all this money and stuff they really don't need and won't use to anywhere near its potential.

wheres the common sense that i'll upgrade the RAM or harddrive when i need it? afterall, RAM/harddrives are going to get cheaper as time goes on. i can understand investing in a better processor/screen/GPU because these can't be upgraded and allow future proofing to a certain degree..

BTW im in the process of buying a MBP hopefully in the next week or two so i'm interesting in opinions/advice! thank you.
 
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RAGE!

Anywho, an SSD isn't only for the speed freaks amongst us. They offer more reliability against head crashes (as there aren't any), better security if you can perform a secure_erase, cooler, quieter etc.

128G is more than enough depending on what you do with it. Not everyone rips their entire blu-ray collection and (for some reason) needs to have it on their desktop. I have an 80 GB intel SSD which is more than sufficient for the OS and application files I store on it. The other 5.4 Tb of space I have available stores files that I don't need to carry around with me for whatever reason.
 
128 - 256GB SSD's tend to be ok for me in size. Though I also have several high capacity flash drives as well as SDXC cards, which increase storage capacity dramatically. I also have my 10TB file server at home so I can basically keep whatever I need on there. Really for most people 128GB would probably be enough; but like damn near everything it all depends on the usage of the individual.
 
aoaaron said:
SSDs granted ARE amazing but if you're using your macbook pro as a primary device, you are going to need all the space you can get!
Click to expand...

That's why there are 500GB SSD's. (Ya think?)

also SSDs ATM are so expensive that in a years time they will be bigger, better and CHEAPER.
Click to expand...

You're stating the obvious. Did you have an epiphany or something?

its so frustrating to me (or maybe i am ignorant, please englighten me?) why users are splashing out on 8GB of RAM + SSDs when their described uses/needs won't warrant the outlay.
Click to expand...

Why does other peoples pain bother you so much?

I sometimes edit up to 1500 RAW photos in a day. I couldn't do this without an SSD (and keep my sanity). Swapping between applications and loading 18 megapixel files in photoshop is too disk intensive.
 
I use a 240GB SSD, and moved much of my media off to an external drive, a FW800 4TB RAID 0+1 and a second 4TB RAID 0 for backup (that's 6 x 2TB drives).

I'm using 180GB on the SSD, but will get that down another 40GB when I move the rest of my iTunes library (mostly music) to the RAID. I can also save another 50GB if I move my photo RAW files and Aperture library to the RAID, in which case a 120 GB SSD would do fine for everyday use (which includes all the stuff I need for software development, my day job).
 
I've got about 60 gigs of apps and files on my laptop drive. I keep all my video, lossless music files, and RAW files off on an external drive. I have mp3s and select jpegs on my laptop.

I don't have an SSD drive though 🙁
 
I have the OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD in my 2010 MBP. It took literally 5 minutes to install and it's the best upgrade I've ever done. The 120GB instead of 128 is because there is an 8 GB section of the drive reserved for the SandForce process, which is designed to help maintain the high performance of the drive.

Right now the drive I have is going for $210 on Amazon, which is a chunk less than the 128GB upgrade from the Apple store, plus you end up with your original drive as a spare. (in my case I got a USB3 enclosure from Newegg for $15.)
 
aoaaron said:
How can people justify installing an SSD 128GB over either 750GB/500GB 7200 drives? This is after reading sooo many people hyping on and reccomending 128GB SSDs.
Click to expand...

I stopped reading after this line.

The answer is because we have external hds for everything else.
 
I think even now, SSDs can offer a dramatic improvement in speed over hard disks. The HDD is undeniably the bottleneck of modern computers at the moment.

What has prevented me from upgrading, other than the obvious cost (which I can bear), is the rapid pace that SSD technology is improving.

Next-gen SSDs are quite literally twice as fast as what is available now. Look up reviews for the OCZ Vertex 3. That shows what is to come in the very near future.

OS X won't have TRIM support until Lion, etc. IMO SSDs aren't quite there, but within the year they will be. Then I'll pull the trigger.

Don't get me wrong, the SSDs you get in the Apple computers now are faster than regular hard drives, but they are really slow compared to what will be available in just 3-6 months from now.

With regard to capacity, the increasing availability of high-speed internet has reduced the importance of high capacity storage. You can stream 1080p videos, listen to your music on Grooveshark, etc. For many people, they just want speed, and can use an external drive if they really need to store large videos.

With Thunderbolt, the possibility of truly fast external storage is becoming a reality. Within a year Seagate and WD will have Thunderbolt external drives. I think next year will be a great time to get a SSD.
 
thanks for the replies. hmmm some really good points which have been brought up.

can someone brief me on external harddrive storage? I imagine I'll need around 2TB of external storage.

Last time i used an external harddrive a lot, it was a bit of a pain (noise + speed was bad etc.) (this was years ago though).

right now I'm leaning towards 500GB @ 7200RPM and then enclosing that when these new SSDs come out?
 
I'm not convinced that 128gb will be enough, however I'm going to give it a try. My current laptop has a 500gb drive that's a little less than half full. The heavy hitters in use are photos/videos and music as you eluded to. The problem is, I've not really listened to music on my laptop at all in the last 12 months. I've not even opened iTunes more than once in the last 12 months. Additionally, I've not browsed my pictures much either. Sure, I'll go looking for one here or there, or I'll add a couple to it... but in reality, I carry everything around for no good reason.

Performance is important to me. I use my machine for development (Android & .Net currenty, expanding to iOS once I get my MBP), web browsing, and light gaming (WoW & Starcraft). With development, it's not the compiling that you notice the performance differences.... it's the emulators and debugging. Likewise, I don't care what my framerate is while hanging out in the AH in Stormwind, but I do care what it is when I get into a raid and find all of the spell effects killing my FPS until I can barely move.

I've never owned a SSD, but I ordered one this time. I also ordered a optical by hard drive caddy so I can add my current 500gb drive to the mix if needed.

I'm going to give a very strong effort to trying to make 128gb work first. I'll be bootcamping Windows 7 and installin VMWare Fusion under OS X. I'll be installing xCode, Eclipse, OpenOffice, WoW, and Starcraft under OSx, and I'll be installing VS.Net, Eclipse, MS Office, Open Office, Photoshop CS5, WoW, and Starcraft under Wnidows 7. Assuming all of that fits, my source code and current photos will be the only data residing on the machine. I use SVN on a cloud server to house my source code repository, and I'll be using Google Images to store my photos online. My intention is to leverage as many 'cloud' options as possible for content storage in an effort to maximize the usefulness of a small SSD and to provide better long term storage than an internal disk drive, eliminating the need to perform nightly backups of my machine.
 
vertex 3 is now out, almost two times faster then vertex 2, just orderd a 256ssd for my mbp.

vertex 3 is going to kick ass
 
IMHO, SSD at the current price is very expensive, so I want it to be more future-proof. At least 512GB is needed for this purpose.
 
haruhiko said:
IMHO, SSD at the current price is very expensive, so I want it to be more future-proof. At least 512GB is needed for this purpose.
Click to expand...

Have you considered that the majority of people using large amounts of disk space in their personal machines are simply digital hoarders and could probably make do with substantially less? Even those that just have tons of photos they don't want to delete would be better served by uploading them 'to the cloud' as opposed to keeping them on their local machine. From a backup perspective, keeping things online is much better than on a single computer..... even with a regular backup to a network or USB drive. Trust me, I had a house fire and saw my backups go up in smoke along with my comptuer.

Cloud storage > *.*
 
Grouchy Bob said:
That's why there are 500GB SSD's. (Ya think?)



You're stating the obvious. Did you have an epiphany or something?



Why does other peoples pain bother you so much?

I sometimes edit up to 1500 RAW photos in a day. I couldn't do this without an SSD (and keep my sanity). Swapping between applications and loading 18 megapixel files in photoshop is too disk intensive.
Click to expand...

Good call Bob.
The more of your posts I read, the more I like you.
Nice to have some sanity on Macrumors 😀
 
wct097 said:
Have you considered that the majority of people using large amounts of disk space in their personal machines are simply digital hoarders and could probably make do with substantially less? Even those that just have tons of photos they don't want to delete would be better served by uploading them 'to the cloud' as opposed to keeping them on their local machine. From a backup perspective, keeping things online is much better than on a single computer..... even with a regular backup to a network or USB drive. Trust me, I had a house fire and saw my backups go up in smoke along with my comptuer.

Cloud storage > *.*
Click to expand...

I have more than 50GBs of digital photos and videos since I bought my first digital camera in 2002. Which cloud can offer me this storage space without additional cost (which also doesn't compress my photos)? I think the best solution balancing price and performance is to have a small SSD drive for the OS and a traditional harddrive for data at this point, just like the proven wrong rumor for the 2011 MBP.
 
haruhiko said:
I have more than 50GBs of digital photos and videos since I bought my first digital camera in 2002. Which cloud can offer me this storage space without additional cost (which also doesn't compress my photos)? I think the best solution balancing price and performance is to have a small SSD drive for the OS and a traditional harddrive for data at this point, just like the proven wrong rumor for the 2011 MBP.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure Google Images stores it at the full original resolution. Not 50gb worth for free though. Remember that your drive space in your computer isn't free either. Again, I come back to the point that people carrying around ten years worth of photos, probably aren't using them on a daily basis. Do you carry around your family's photo albums from 20 years ago in the trunk of your car, then complain when the latest and greatest car doesn't have all of that trunk space?

Tough habbit to break, but a reasonable one to deal with. My goal for the next week, while I wait for my new MBP, is to move all of my photos (about 65gb worth) to a network share that I can access while I'm at home. At the same time, I'll be selecting the more important photos that I'd want to access on-the-go to upload to my private repository with Google.

edit: Google's pricing is 1gb free, 20gb $5/yr, and 80gb for $20/yr. When you factor in the redundancy and access from any computer, that seems pretty cheap.
 
wct097 said:
Pretty sure Google Images stores it at the full original resolution. Not 50gb worth for free though. Remember that your drive space in your computer isn't free either. Again, I come back to the point that people carrying around ten years worth of photos, probably aren't using them on a daily basis. Do you carry around your family's photo albums from 20 years ago in the trunk of your car, then complain when the latest and greatest car doesn't have all of that trunk space?

Tough habbit to break, but a reasonable one to deal with. My goal for the next week, while I wait for my new MBP, is to move all of my photos (about 65gb worth) to a network share that I can access while I'm at home. At the same time, I'll be selecting the more important photos that I'd want to access on-the-go to upload to my private repository with Google.

edit: Google's pricing is 1gb free, 20gb $5/yr, and 80gb for $20/yr. When you factor in the redundancy and access from any computer, that seems pretty cheap.
Click to expand...

What about music? My computer is my main music player, and I do use all 120GB of it regularly. And AFAIK iTunes doesn't allow you to split your library into little pieces.

This would all be much, much simpler if Apple simply offered the possibility of replacing the useless Superdrive with a small SSD, so you could use a bigger HDD for storage.
 
Tyrion said:
What about music? My computer is my main music player, and I do use all 120GB of it regularly. And AFAIK iTunes doesn't allow you to split your library into little pieces.

This would all be much, much simpler if Apple simply offered the possibility of replacing the useless Superdrive with a small SSD, so you could use a bigger HDD for storage.
Click to expand...

You've got me there. I prefer internet radio to mixing my own playlists. Unless you're a DJ, I can't fathom how an individual can actually use 120gb worth of music 'regularly'. You'd literally have to be playing it 24x7 for three weeks straight to listen to every song more than once.

Before I got my Android phone, which I now use in my vehicle for internet radio, I used an old iPod Nano with 2gb of storage, and never ran out of stuff to listen to.
 
wct097 said:
You've got me there. I prefer internet radio to mixing my own playlists. Unless you're a DJ, I can't fathom how an individual can actually use 120gb worth of music 'regularly'. You'd literally have to be playing it 24x7 for three weeks straight to listen to every song more than once.

Before I got my Android phone, which I now use in my vehicle for internet radio, I used an old iPod Nano with 2gb of storage, and never ran out of stuff to listen to.
Click to expand...

Well, it's just my collection - partly from my many, many CDs, partly stuff I bought online. I obviously don't listen to all of that every single day, but I wouldn't want to delete any of it either. So that's kind of a dilemma, because I also have 20-30 gigabytes' worth of photographs. Even if I get an expensive 256 GB SSD, I'm already constricted (and one shouldn't fill SSDs up to the brim).
 
Look, the benefits of SSD over HDD are plain as day. The thing cuts boot times in half, my MBA is booted up in 10-15 seconds. That's insane.

But if you need more space, then either get a higher capacity SSD and shell out the dough or stick to a high capacity HDD.

But there is no debate when it comes to SDD and HDD. SDD completely rapes it.
 
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