I plan on picking up an SSD soon for my Macbook Pro to benefit from the added performance ofcourse. Im a little new to this so Id like some recommendations. I purchased the base 2011 15' model. Whats the best, fastest SSD I can put into this computer? Also, is it fine to use an SSD as my primary drive? I believe Ive read around that over time the life of the SSD will severely deteriorate due to somewhat limited amounts of read/write on the blocks. I also see people here on the forums using optibay mods to have dual drives, SSD and a standard drive, which isnt something I really want to do. Whats the truth to this?
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SSD questions
- Thread starter dw3bb10
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Since you have one of the new MacBooks with SATA III, I would recommend waiting until the next generation of SSD's come out in the next couple months. It should be well worth it. I am not sure about the drive deterioration, haven't heard anyone really complain of it though. I just picked up a 120GB OWC SSD and im loving the speed increase. I used to see the beachball every 2 minutes and now I never see it at all. Everything is so much snappier and more responsive. But since I went from 500GB HDD to 120GB SSD I am considering getting an optibay for the HDD so I can still throw all my media on it / have a built in time machine disk and never need an external.
On any modern SSD, you likely won't see any noticeable performance degradation. I assume you're just going to be using it for everyday stuff.
With regards to "fastest," it's basically the same thing. What exactly do you plan on doing with the computer? If you're just installing your programs and running from the SSD, basically any SSD out there will feel roughly the same to you (all SSDs will feel orders of magnitude faster than regular HDDs). Basically the fastest on the market would boot your computer in 14 seconds as opposed to the 15 of a slower SSD (expect 40+ for an HDD). In this case, I'd recommend you wait 1-2 months until Intel releases their 320 series, which should bring SSD prices down considerably, while preserving Intel's legendary reliability, and amazing everyday-use performance.
If you're using the SSD for more disk-intensive tasks such video editing, however, you will probably actually want the fastest. In this case, I'd also recommend waiting a little while, since the newest MBPs seem to be having some minor issues with regards to SATA III SSDs.
