vickaloo

Hi,

It's time to upgrade my laptop and I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about the solid state drive. The guys at Apple highly recommend it, but will I really notice a difference if I generally work in Photoshop/InDesign? I know that it is only $200 more but by the time I ring in all of the extras the laptop is getting pricey.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Stephanie

"Worth it" is a relative term. It depends on what's most important to you. I swapped out the standard hard drive in my laptop for a SSD.

In my experience the SSD is marginally faster (at reads, at least) and noticably lighter. If you're worried about falls / drops then the SSD also has an advantage of no moving parts. On the downside, it's more expensive and dollar-for-dollar you get a lot less space on the SSD than you would on a normal drive.

For me, I was willing to sacrifice storage space for a small boost in speed and a bit less weight.

Cheers!

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Andrew Pratt

I put an SSD into an older MBPro and it brought back new life to it. Apps leaped into life and things were generally very snappy...but as stephanie points out you don't get the same amount of storage per dollar so if you need capacity an SSD isn't for you.

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(( p g ))

If money's tight then no, you're not going to get the value you're looking for. SSD is nice for the reasons others have outlined, but marginally better performance doesn't seem worth it when you consider you're getting less storage for more money.

mguertin

It's considerably more than "marginally better" performance .. it depends on what you're doing. With a decent SSD drive you're getting pretty much double what you would get from a standard hard drive as far as I/O speed. In the computer world I would hardly consider that "marginal".

If you're saving/opening BIG photoshop files and/or doing a lot of disk intensive things it's a big performance bump ... but it's not an essential need (most people don't buy laptops for their performance). If you need to cut corners on the final price this is a good place to trim it.

screature

^^^ +1

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macintosh doctor

client of mine went with SSD in his laptop, since he is brutal with his equipment as well does the BAJA every year.. so in his case it is was all about 'no moving parts' - he is a roaming news reporter so that made perfect sense in his case..
=)

i-rui

It's an upgrade you can always do down the road (and SSD drives are always getting less expensive). If cost is a concern, put it off and upgrade down the line.

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Fox

I bought an SSD for my netbook, but I wouldn't put one in a Mac because MacOSX doesn't support the Trim function. SSD's are different from standard drives with regard to erased data; most operating systems won't automatically record this space as being free, so the drive tends to fill up. Trim fixes this problem, and it works with Windows and Linux, but not, to my knowledge, with MacOSX. This means that if you have a relatively low capacity drive, it will fill up and the only way to free the erased, unused space is to clone the drive, wipe it completely and reinstall the clone.

An alternative that is cheaper and has many of the advantages of an SSD is a hybrid drive like the Seagate XT series (comes in 250, 320 and 500 gb versions). It's a hybrid because it has a solid state component (4 or 8 gb; can't remember which). I got one of these for my Mac mini; it's pretty fast.

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Benito

I agree. it is much more than a marginal improvement. My MBP starts much more quickly and apps start much more quickly, it is quite noticeable. If you don't open a lot of apps when you start your computer, then you might not notice that much of a difference. But if you do open many at a time, you will be able to tell a big difference.

The only problem is cost and relatively small storage space.

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