SSD vs these high performance drives

[paintballmjm]

Hey everyone

I'm not at all experienced with SSD as I've worked with regular spinning hard drives my whole life. I've been looking into upgrading my existing 500GB/7200/3Gbps hard drive in my 2011 MBP. I know there are many advantages of SSD, but most comparisons I've seen are between SSD and standard 7200rpm drives with 16MB buffer size and SATA 3Gb/s (like mine). So I'd really like to hear from especially those who have actually made the decision between SSD and the drives below, and what they think. Pricing is not an issue in this case.

There are two hard drives that I think could be potential condenders, if not victors. These are based on either reviews and/or specs. Here they are:


WD Scorpio Black (mostly based on reviews)
7200rpm / 16MB / 3Gbps
Product Page


Seagate Momentus XT (solid state hybrid, based on specs/reviews)
7200rpm / 32MB / 6Gbps
Product Page

What I do:

• HD1080p editing/compositing/realtime playback
• 24-bit audio recording/editing
• Import >50GB batches of files at a time

What do you think?

Thanks!

 

[dlewis23]

SSD is the way to go no question.

 

[Zwhaler]

SSD is a lot faster, but you will pay a pretty ridiculous premium to get a capacity that fits the needs of a video editor.

 

[riptideMBP]

I'm pretty sure the performance of any SSD will be better than that of a HDD... that being said, space is clearly an issue. A lot of people get around this by ditching the optical drive for a second hard drive bay (so you could have a small SSD and a large HDD in the laptop). Is that an option for you?

 

[Dweez]

Access times of an SSD are a fraction that of spinning media, and the multiple hundred MB per second reads & writes just can't be approached by an HD.

Had a first generation Momentus XT in a windows laptop and honestly didn't see much gain in performance. I purposely imaged the current drive to the XT so it would be at least somewhat an apples to apes comparison.

$0.02 worth.

 

[fs454]

The drives you posted don't even come even sort of close to the performance of an SSD. I have a WD VelociRaptor 10,000 rpm drive as my boot disk in my Mac Pro and it does not come close to offering what my MBA's solid state drive does.


SSDs are truly on another level.

 

[PAPO]

if price is no issue, go for the $3,200 (ish) 1TB OCZ Octane, one of only 2 1TB SSD's in existence, and by far the better performer