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SSD drive vs 7200 RPM drive

S

sindyan

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 21, 2010
1
0
I was wondering for graphic design purposes would there be a change in performance of SSD drive on the Macbook Pro vs the 7200 rpm drive?


Also, would there be much of a performance upgrade going to the icore 7 2.66hz vs the icore 5 ghz? (in sense of performance improvement vs the extra cost)


(this question is for my wife who is getting hired onto a church staff as the graphic design artist).

Thanks,
Anthony
 
The performance difference will be in startup and loading of applications. Using an SSD for graphic design might not be the best of ideas, especially if working on large images. SSDs have a finite number of writes per cell and, because Mac OS X doesn't currently support TRIM, those writes will cause the SSD to become slower and slower over time.

A 7200 RPM drive will do quite nicely for most things and will be much cheaper (especially per megabyte) than an SSD.

-Aaron-
 
SSD if you have money. 7,200 RPM is not worth it. Plus it makes the case vibrate.

Core i5 is sufficient, but obviously Core i7 would crunch data faster.
 
DHagan4755 said:
7,200 RPM is not worth it. Plus it makes the case vibrate.
Click to expand...

WTF?! Vibrate? Never encountered that.

And 7.2k surely makes a difference as opposed to 5.4k. Perhaps you are referring to the old IDE/ ATA days but now we are running on SATA for almost half a decade.
 
If you don't need much space an SSD is amazing. Best single upgrade you can do on a laptop.

For an idea:
Intel 80GB ~ $200
Intel 160GB ~ $400
 
I had terrible vibration problems with 2 separate Seagate 7200 rpm drives. I had to remove them, eventually went to an Intel SSD. Night and day difference. Dead quiet, no vibration, uber fast. Only downsides were cost and lower storage capacity. I use an off-board FW800 drive for data storage, and move stuff onto the SSD as needed. Works like a charm.
 
I am using a Hitachi 500gb 7,200rpm in my HD bay, and another one of the same model in my optibay (dvd drive area), no vibration whatsoever.

I would love a SSD drive, but mainly cost and the TRIM thing (I do graphics, photo work mainly) is sort of deterring me currently from getting one.

I just bought a Momentus XT hybrid on Newegg, gonna see if anything improves, I'm not getting my hopes up though, besides faster startup and app launch times.
 
diablo2112 said:
I had terrible vibration problems with 2 separate Seagate 7200 rpm drives. I had to remove them, eventually went to an Intel SSD. Night and day difference. Dead quiet, no vibration, uber fast. Only downsides were cost and lower storage capacity. I use an off-board FW800 drive for data storage, and move stuff onto the SSD as needed. Works like a charm.
Click to expand...

you should empty out your dvd drive and use an optibay of some sort. The clones is cheap, and man it is amazing.
 
chiefroastbeef said:
you should empty out your dvd drive and use an optibay of some sort. The clones is cheap, and man it is amazing.
Click to expand...

I have the optibay. Installed it for a few days, and found 1) I didn't like the noise of ANY hard drive in the MBP. I have a very silent house, and a dead-quiet MBP is appealing. 2) I use the built-in DVD much more frequently than I need to hookup an external drive for off-board storage (mainly, I rip DVDs with Handbrake), often while on travel, at friends, etc.
 
I just ordered a new MBP with the 7200 RPM upgrade -- so my computer is going to freaking vibrate now?! Lol.
 
I put a 7200rpm drive in my new model 13" MBP and it doesn't vibrate at all. Can't even hear the hard drive. The key was to remove the studs from the original drive and put them in the new one. If you don't do that, then yeah, it vibrates, but you'd have to be pretty dumb to miss that one.
 
chiefroastbeef said:
I am using a Hitachi 500gb 7,200rpm in my HD bay, and another one of the same model in my optibay (dvd drive area), no vibration whatsoever.
Click to expand...

+1

I have the same experience after upgrading to the same hard drive, the Hitachi is silent!

I'm a designer as well and indulge in video editing once in a while. Run CS5 on my 15" i7, 7200RPM and feel the only thing I really need would be more RAM when working on big files, virtualizing and have a lot of apps/browser tabs open (I'm a pretty heavy user). The computer is lightning fast, but I think 64-bit apps like CS5 really help improve performance.
 
This site needs more "Stickies". I have started to visit this forum several times a day and it seems the same questions are asked over and over and... over.

Other then getting your post count up, its doing no one any favors.

The question of what value an SSD brings to the table from a performance perspective has to be one of most talked about tech topics on every tech site and almost every hardware forum around. Sites like anandtech, maximumpc, pcperspectives, notebook review, mac performance guide, and toms hardware guide and MacRumors have 100's if not 1000's of pages and benchmarks related to this topic.


Ya gotta open google or http://mroogle.*************/ and search a little!!!!
 
BobbyCarbn said:
This site needs more "Stickies". I have started to visit this forum several times a day and it seems the same questions are asked over and over and... over.

Other then getting your post count up, its doing no one any favors.

The question of what value an SSD brings to the table from a performance perspective has to be one of most talked about tech topics on every tech site and almost every hardware forum around. Sites like anandtech, maximumpc, pcperspectives, notebook review, mac performance guide, and toms hardware guide and MacRumors have 100's if not 1000's of pages and benchmarks related to this topic.


Ya gotta open google or http://mroogle.*************/ and search a little!!!!
Click to expand...

Yeah the moderators around here have a hatred of stickies or something. We have a few threads we think should be stickied (i.e. 2.4Ghz i5 vs 2.53Ghz i5 vs 2.66Ghz i7) but it just never happens.
 
I've had the stock 7200 HDD, the drive was ok, whenever you move or tilted the Macbook Pro it made a light saber sound! I've no doubt everything was fine, and it was just the rpms, but I hated the heat on my lap form the HDD, battery life was average 5hrs. I had some trackpad issues and Apple took it back, I then reordered the same Macbook with the 512 SSD. Let me just say I will never ever go back to a HDD, performance is simply epic. 10 hrs battery now and no heat on my leg, large .jpg photos and applications like Photoshop all open instantly, pdfs, Illustrator file read and rights are like lightning. If you go from HDD to SSD you will will never ever regret it if. I would say performance on the Mac SSD averages about 175mb per sec, but I ran the OWC Mercury Extreme SSD and it gave 225mb per sec. (i.e it can save a 225mb file in 1 sec) I'm happy with the 175 speed offering from Apple knowing its got Apples customer service. Oh and regards the cost, yep it is high, but look at it another way, I get about 4 years from my Apple Laptops, that works out less than €1 per day for the glory of no system bottleneck, Just my 2 cents....
 
An SSD is going to result in an improved speed of your system. The newer SSD's do garbage collection in the background and so you don't need to worry about TRIM support at the OS level. Since the price difference is quite substantial, you need to do your own cost-benefit analysis. Below are the Xbench scores for my 7200 RPM and SSD drives.
 

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Is this possible:
replace the disk drive with an SSD and use the SSD to boot and start applications.
write everything to the HDD.
you would just get a 60gig SSD or w.e. the smallest size available is.
 
No way an SSD is worth it for me at this point.

The prices for them need to be cut in half at the very least.
 
Its going to be a while before you see big drops on SSD's prices, its very hard to find 512GB ones available to ship, OWC have them for sale, but its 20 days before they ship and its been like that since May, they keep putting back the dates, there is a huge global shortage of anything more than 256GB. Lots of them for sale on sites, but no one with one in hand ready to go, Apple had them however. I assume its the shortage thats keeping prices high. I have to say it hurt me more spending 3K on a laptop and all that power going to waste because of a HDD bottleneck, 33% extra of that outlay extra gives me 100% of the speed the Macbook is capable of.

But listen each to their own, Im just answering the original question, I've no doubt users with HDD's are more than happy with them, I was too, until I tried an SDD! Weight it up yourself if you think its worth the $1 a day!
 
Corndog5595 said:
Is this possible:
replace the disk drive with an SSD and use the SSD to boot and start applications.
write everything to the HDD.
you would just get a 60gig SSD or w.e. the smallest size available is.
Click to expand...

Of course it's possible. Just replace your SuperDrive with an HDD placed in an adapter.
 
Corndog5595 said:
Is this possible:
replace the disk drive with an SSD and use the SSD to boot and start applications.
write everything to the HDD.
you would just get a 60gig SSD or w.e. the smallest size available is.
Click to expand...

there's a brief thread or two devoted to this. somewhat detailed instructions, suggested parts, etc. sorry i don't have the address at hand. search it up. another vote for stickies here.
 
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