New Macbook Pro's: Solid State or 7200 RPM Hard Drive?

[Dustin L.]

What should I go with? The less latency and ruggedness of the solid state drive sounds enticing but I'm not too comfortable purchasing a product that has a hard drive separate from the norm. There is also the problem of wear leveling which I don't know too much about. Thoughts?

[davepermen]

wear leveling is no issue. the low latency and the ruggedness are awesome. having something seperate from the norm is a good thing (sometimes).

if you have the money, go for it. personally, i only have intel ssds by now, they deliver great performance and never failed on me once yet.

[taximouse]

i'd go with solid state if you can afford it...for silence reasons.
the spinning of my regular drive is the loudest thing about my MBP.

[sdmiddleton]

What should I go with? The less latency and ruggedness of the solid state drive sounds enticing but I'm not too comfortable purchasing a product that has a hard drive separate from the norm. There is also the problem of wear leveling which I don't know too much about. Thoughts?

Alright buddy, check out this link, lots of debate and external info..

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... 80&start=0

S

[skeet]

I recently got a Macbook Pro with a 256GB Solid State Drive and...:

Damn, I don't ever ever want anything else but such a drive in a portable device!!
I definitely can recommend a SSD over the HDD.
It's fast, it's calm it's damn cool

[ekwipt]

I got the 500gb 7200 rpm option on the apple website. I'd only install an Intel SSD in a MacBook Pro personally even though there are faster options available. The Apple SSD drives aren't as fast as the Intel or the OWC which are faster still.

For performace I'd buy an Intel 120 Gb and a 500 gb 7200 rpm Lacie rugged drive for samples. What I did though was buy the 500 gb apple drive and the Lacie Rugged andkeep everything cloned. That way if something fails, you can use the FireWire drive to boot as the master, not ideal but it will get you through a night if all else fails.

[CR78]

I'm waiting until late summer/early fall to get an OWC SSD. I spoke to their Tech department and they're increasing SSD sizing in 100GB increments. So we'll soon see a 300GB,400GB etc. as well as more price drops.

[Tarekith]

500GB 5400rpm drive in my new MBP. Not noisey or giving me any disk access issues. More than fast enough for my needs. SSD is nice, but still too expensive for what you get IMO.

[davepermen]

while i don't agree with the "still too pricey for what you get" (it's such of a world of a difference.. it was a bigger step for me than moving from a pentium3 to a quadcore. a much more noticeable step, at least.

so while i don't, i do agree that right now is a nice time to wait, if one is happy with it's setup. the generation 3 of intel ssds is on it's way, and should be right around to be a great Christmas present. they will come in 50,100,200,300 and bigger sizes, i think, and should, again, blast everything away.

on the one side, i'm happy to not have to touch hdds since nearly two years now, on the other side, everyone not knowing yet the difference can continue to wait, and saves money

[earthlinger]

So are there any certain facts about 7200 rpm HDD vs SSD's?
There are so many confusions around that subject.
After using my 1st gen. CoreDuo MBP for more than 4 years I'm still undecided
which HD option I should pick as a long term (5 years) investment for MBP i7's.

I mean do I still need external drive for heavy reading&writing sessions
if I have 500GB-7200rpm vs 256GB SSD from Apple?
The only firewire port will be used by Fireface800,
since I eliminated 17inch MBP because of portability.

[davepermen]

no external drive needed for heavy reading writing on an ssd. the one thing that they're great at is multiple read/writes in parallel (esp. the intel ssds, 10 parallel lanes) without interfering each other.

so if you can put everything on the disk, means you have enough storage, then there's 0 need for an external disk (and actually, so far, i haven't seen much need even with an ordinary disk anymore. they got much faster and with sata2 and NPQ or how's that called again, they're quite good at parallel stuff now, too.

the biggest issue is having enough storage, which is highly dependent on how you work, what exactly you do. for my desktop workstation, 80gb is more than enough, for the media center, 40gb is enough. for the laptop, i have 160gb and not even filled by half most of the time (but great for caching uncompressed audio).

[earthlinger]

merci for the informative reaction davepermen.
Since I need more than 250GB for my library & my budget is not that flexible for SSD's,
I think I will go with 7200rpm for now.
I hope they could perform better than my 4 year old internal 100GB 7200rpm HD
under heavy sessions
or perform same as my lacie littlebig 200GB 7200 rpm connected through FW800 expresscard.

[davepermen]

merci for the informative reaction davepermen.
Since I need more than 250GB for my library & my budget is not that flexible for SSD's,
I think I will go with 7200rpm for now.
I hope they could perform better than my 4 year old internal 100GB 7200rpm HD
under heavy sessions
or perform same as my lacie littlebig 200GB 7200 rpm connected through FW800 expresscard.

the drive should work better than both your 100gb internal, and your 200gb external.

[earthlinger]

the drive should work better than both your 100gb internal, and your 200gb external.

that's great then...

[Tarekith]

And it's not like you need to keep the drive for 5 years either. The new MBP's make it easy to swap HD's, and generally they are fairly cheap.