I am wondering what the benifts of the SSD are compared to a conventional HD. I am planing on doing some gaming and school related stuff on a high end MBP. is the $1100 worth it for a 500GB SSD (i need the 500GB over 250GB) or should I save my money?
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SSD or Regular HD
- Thread starter bohnje
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I just picked up a Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB 7200 RPM / 4GB SSD hybrid. It can be had for around $100 online and a little more at Best Buy. So far I really like it. My early 2008 white Penryn Macbook boots faster now and I have plenty of space. I wouldn't invest in "pure" SSD until it comes down around "only double" or "only triple" regular media. Spending $1100 on a 500 Gig SSD is way too much money. Another approach would be a 60 gig SSD boot drive with a 7200 RPM drive in the optical bay. I'm glad I didn't do that one. I'd rather have my optical bay.
I got the same drive and i have had nothing but problems. I couldn't get it to boot off the drive. Tried installing os x with it in a usb enclosure (which it did, but still wouldn't boot), etc, etc. In the end i gave up, i've just ordered a 115gb ssd drive from owc, and im going to run my large aperture library from an external 500gb 7200 drive. I found with the 320gb 5400rpm boot drive it took ages for it to process any changes to RAW NEF files.
Sorry to hear you had so much trouble. I did it a little more conservatively.
1 - change time machine to back up to 1 TB firewire drive - wait overnight for full 100 gig backup
2 - pop out 160 gig 5400 rpm drive and pop in momentus
3 - insert osx snow leopard dvd and let it install
4 - after initial install, when prompted, pick the backup i just made to the firewire drive for migration
5 - everything went perfectly however i had to delete mail.app's preferences and mail folders and start over, no big real really
6 - trouble free ever since - getting faster and faster as the hybrid drive "learns" the files I use every day and caches them to the ssd.
7 - oh, and I had to "start over" on my time machine backups by renaming the pre-upgrade sparsebundle files. No great loss.
Boot time is less than half what it was before the hybrid drive, not that OS X was ever slow to boot. It's not as instant as my iPad but it makes Windows 7 look like three legged dog trying to climb a sand dune.
I also have carbon copy cloner and ran a backup using CCC but decided against restoring it to the hybrid drive. I wanted something that relied only on Apple software and no third party software. Besides, I didn't want to shell out $30 for a USB to SATA adapter.
I personly would recommend you to buy the 128GB SSD and an external drive of 1TB or so (a portable one).
Or wait a bit to buy it (a week or two) and see wath apple has sone to the TimeMachien. If it will be an iCloud devise, you buy the 2TB TM and the MBP with 128SSD, then your MBP will be verry fast and you'll be able to acces all your files over the air (iCloud).
That's wath I'm waiting for.
Or wait a bit to buy it (a week or two) and see wath apple has sone to the TimeMachien. If it will be an iCloud devise, you buy the 2TB TM and the MBP with 128SSD, then your MBP will be verry fast and you'll be able to acces all your files over the air (iCloud).
That's wath I'm waiting for.