First, if you're sincerely willing to put some effort into it, I'd really recommend you do some basic research on computer concepts and terms, otherwise you're kind of at the mercy of whoever offered you advice last, and you don't know enough to even know whether it's good advice. Unfortunately there's just as much "bad" advice as there's "good" advice on these forums, even when it's all good intentions. And what happens here is people will tune out if it becomes apparent they're going to have to spend a lot of time going over super basic stuff.I would have no problem going with the 256 SSD instead of the Fusion Drive. The only concern I have with that is that I have no idea how fast that would fill up. I don't know how much memory podcasts or photos use. And I don't know how many MB make up a GB, make up a TB, etc., I'm putting the effort in to learn, though.
It's both easy to underestimate and overestimate storage space.. Based on your screen shots, you're currently using about 120GB, which includes OS X, apps, and your own files. Most of that is currently video, which as you stated earlier, you're not sure where that came from... I can't help you there. If you transferred exactly what you're storing to a new iMac with a 256GB SSD, you have very roughly 130GB (0.13TB or 130,000MB) of free space left. So how much does typical "stuff" take up? Again, you can explore that more in-depth via googling, but some common (average) numbers:
OS X & a bunch of typical apps: 40-60GB total.
A typical "office" document: 1-5MB each.
Digital photo from an iPhone: 2MB.
5 min. iTunes song: 10MB
60 min. Podcast: 30 MB.
5 min. "completed" HD iMovie: 200MB (if you delete the "working" files after you're done)
60 min. iTunes HD tv episode: 2GB.
2 hr iTunes HD movie: 4 GB.
So let's say you were just going to fill the remaining 130GB of free space with podcasts - you'd be able to store over 4,000 60 min. podcasts (4,000 x 30MB = 120,000MB or 120GB).
If you got a Fusion Drive (which transparently combines a 128GB SSD with a 1TB HDD), you'd have even way more space. The "FD" stores as much as it can on the 128GB SSD portion, and what doesn't fit there, gets stored on the HDD portion. From all accounts, OS X is pretty smart about deciding what's most important to store on the SSD portion, but ultimately you don't have control over deciding that. If you were less specific about "speed", I'd feel more comfortable suggesting the FD, but I'd recommend the "pure" SSD just to play it safe for absolute best storage performance.
And, if your media library ever does get too big to fit on the SSD, you can buy an external hard drive and store your iTunes library on that instead (my iTunes library is 3TB, which I store on an external hard drive).
Last edited: