SSD drive "worth it" yet?

[vzippa5]

I've been reading all the SSD threads and I'm a bit confused by all the brands, prices, issues, etc. and wondering if it's worth the upgrade for me. I've got about $100-300 to spend on this upgrade.

Primary use for my macbook (2.2GHZ intel core 2 duo , 4GB RAM installed, 500GB 5400rpm harddrive installed) is running Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop- I am a photographer and after a large photo shoot I may need to upload and edit 100's of photos quickly and easily. Currently, I am not getting the best performance out of my mac's 5400rpm drive.

how much faster would this be on an SSD than say, a new 7200RPM drive?

what are the ssd drives I should be looking at in my price range?

should I wait for the prices to come down a bit and go with a 7200rpm drive, for now?

 

[chill.]

can you elaborate on what you mean by uploading and editing hundreds of photos?

are you uploading photos online? that depends on your internet connection

if you are editing photos with photoshop then your video card is much more important

what do you think a faster hard drive will really accomplish? the difference between 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm is not really noticeable. a high quality ssd in the $100-300 price range will only be 40-60 gb of storage, which i think would be really unsuitable if you have a ton of media

i'm going to bet your speed bottleneck is due to your video card. the older macbooks have integrated intel video cards which are pretty poor

 

[vzippa5]

I meant that I upload photos to my computer, not online.

Thanks for the tip about my video card, I hadn't thought of that bottleneck- I will now look into it. BTW, can you tell me how do I find out if my MB's video card stinks? It is one of the first "santa rosa" macbooks.

 

[wordoflife]

Keep in mind SSD drives don't last as long as traditional drives- and they have less space and are more expensive.

 

[HyperX13]

Keep in mind SSD drives don't last as long as traditional drives- and they have less space and are more expensive.

ssd drives last a LOT longer than traditional drives, are much faster and are more expensive

my crucial ssd has 880,000 hours mtbf (mean time between failure). no hdd can touch that!!

 

[vistadude]

No company has been able to prove that (almost 100 years) and that's if you never write or read to it. SSD drives fail much faster when you actually use it as a normal computer, much faster than hard disk drives.

ssd drives last a LOT longer than traditional drives, are much faster and are more expensive

my crucial ssd has 880,000 hours mtbf (mean time between failure). no hdd can touch that!!

 

[Wehrwolf]

I don't know how large your photos are, but if you have hundreds of them to transfer and edit, well, you're not going to get much capacity (or quality) in an SSD with a budget of ~$300.

Also, Photoshop and Lightroom aren't AS dependent on the GPU as they are on the computer's CPU.

Finally, SSDs still vary significantly in their quality, and contain some caveats. I suggest reading through the articles over at anandtech.com that review the technology and provide some useful benchmarks.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=1

If you're willing to spend hundreds of $$ more on a quality SSD in a size comparable to your current 5400RPM drive, then upgrading might be worth it. But otherwise, no.

 

[Wehrwolf]

my crucial ssd has 880,000 hours mtbf (mean time between failure). no hdd can touch that!!

Actually 3.5" enterprise class drives are rated at 1-1.2 million hours MTBF. EVen a run of the mill desktop class drive like the 7200.10 series is rated at about 700000 hours MTBF.

 

[cruggles]

I wouldn't be too concerned with manufacturer MTBF figures - and anyway you are not quoting desktop HDDs not laptop HDDs - this is a MacBook Forum.

I went through 3 HDDs in my previous laptop (in 3 years). I certainly am not getting 6 figure MTBF statistics in my personal usage (frequent traveller).

I challenge anyone to suggest that an SSD is more prone to failure than a mechanical HDD in real world laptop usage.

Cheers, crug

 

[Wehrwolf]

The point was to refute the sweeping assertion that "no" HDD could touch the MTBF estimate quoted on the above SSD -- this is clearly not true.

Real world usage - YMMV.

 

[tman07]

im going to get destroyed for saying this, and it comes with a couple precautions, buttttt:
have you thought of losing your superdrive and replacing it with another 500gb drive and running raid-0? It wont be as fast as an ssd, but it will be much cheaper, you will have lots of room, and you will get a speed increase. However, ONLY think about doing this if you keep a constant, up-to-date, backup. If one drive fails, it all fails.

Also, i'm not sure if the santa rosa macbooks use a sata superdrive(making this useless if not). Im sure others can confirm or not.


But on your other question- if you are using a white/black macbook, yes, your graphics card (or therefore lack of) sucks. Intel GMA 950. That may also be your pitfall.