SSD or quad core MBP?

[Luis Ortega]

I have a 17 inch santa rosa core 2 duo 2.8 MBP with 4 gb of 667 mhz ddr2 ram and a 500gb 7200 rpm hard drive and an 8600 video card with 256mg memory.
I was considering whether to upgrade the hard drive to an ssd 256 gb or whether it might be better to wait for a MBP with an i7 processor, the newest ram and a 7200 rpm hard drive?
Is the performance increase from just adding an ssd drive to my present MBP going to be significant or would getting the next update with a regular hard drive going to show better performance?
I mostly use FCP studio and Photoshop and use an external hard drive when editing video.

 

[Gabriel GR]

I have a 17 inch santa rosa core 2 duo 2.8 MBP with 4 gb of 667 mhz ddr2 ram and a 500gb 7200 rpm hard drive and an 8600 video card with 256mg memory.
I was considering whether to upgrade the hard drive to an ssd 256 gb or whether it might be better to wait for a MBP with an i7 processor, the newest ram and a 7200 rpm hard drive?
Is the performance increase from just adding an ssd drive to my present MBP going to be significant or would getting the next update with a regular hard drive going to show better performance?
I mostly use FCP studio and Photoshop and use an external hard drive when editing video.

I don't think we will see quad core i7s in apple laptops in the upcoming refresh. At 45Watts the TDP is too high.

The SSD will only make opening files and programs faster. Also it will help when you run out of RAM and your computer is paging stuff to the drive. But it wont make video rendering or heavy calculations any faster.

 

[gwsat]

I don't think we will see quad core i7s in apple laptops in the upcoming refresh. At 45Watts the TDP is too high.

The SSD will only make opening files and programs faster. Also it will help when you run out of RAM and your computer is paging stuff to the drive. But it wont make video rendering or heavy calculations any faster.

According to iStat on both my 17 inch 2.4Ghz MBP with 6 gig of RAM, and my 17 inch 1Ghz Powerbook G4 with 1 gig of RAM, the OS always caches some RAM to the disc. Right now, although my MBP is using, wired plus active, only about 4 gig of the 6 gig of installed RAM, 1.25 gig has been cached to disc.

 

[Gabriel GR]

According to iStat on both my 17 inch 2.4Ghz MBP with 6 gig of RAM, and my 17 inch 1Ghz Powerbook G4 with 1 gig of RAM, the OS always caches some RAM to the disc. Right now, although my MBP is using, wired plus active, only about 4 gig of the 6 gig of installed RAM, 1.25 gig has been cached to disc.

A computer will always cache some data. But it happens significantly less when it has more RAM available. The difference after installing an SSD is more dramatic in RAM-deprived systems. Mostly because of SSD's handling simultaneous reads and writes better than HDD's.

 

[newdeal]

...

anything that uses the disk will be more than double the speed with an SSD if you get a good one (not Apples). I seriously doubt the processor will be faster, probobly not double the speed though, and the speed will be better for things that use alot of CPU but not really any faster for things that rely heavily on the disk. Probobly you will notice an SSD in your current machine will be cheaper and feel faster unless you do heavy graphics

 

[Luis Ortega]

anything that uses the disk will be more than double the speed with an SSD if you get a good one (not Apples). I seriously doubt the processor will be faster, probobly not double the speed though, and the speed will be better for things that use alot of CPU but not really any faster for things that rely heavily on the disk. Probobly you will notice an SSD in your current machine will be cheaper and feel faster unless you do heavy graphics

Thanks.
I really don't want to sell my current MBP so soon. It is a great machine.
Does doing video editing and photoshop editing constitute doing heavy graphics?
I do hate having to go to a smaller hard drive.
I started out with the 160 gb it came with but upgraded it to the 500gb because I also put windows on it with bootcamp and it wasn't enough space.
Going back to a 250gb will be a bit hard since my mac partition takes up about 130gb on my current hard drive and I have a 100 gb windows partition.

 

[G5Unit]

Thanks.
I really don't want to sell my current MBP so soon. It is a great machine.
Does doing video editing and photoshop editing constitute doing heavy graphics?
I do hate having to go to a smaller hard drive.
I started out with the 160 gb it came with but upgraded it to the 500gb because I also put windows on it with bootcamp and it wasn't enough space.
Going back to a 250gb will be a bit hard since my mac partition takes up about 130gb on my current hard drive and I have a 100 gb windows partition.

Maybe you could wait 6-9 months for a 512gb SSD to drop in price? Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper every day.

The jump to an i7 from your computer would be noticeable, yet probably in graphic intensive situations only, such as Photoshop, and After Effects rendering.