advice welcome

Hi guys I am almost closed in at choosing my macbook pro.

I have decided to get the mbp 15.4 inch with its 128gb ssd seems like an economical upgrade price for 90 dollars.

Because 128gb will not be enough for me I am planning to buy an external hardrive probably a terabyte one.

Now can anyone who owns the stock 128gb ssd in the newest mbp tell me a few things..

What are the read and write times?
Are you happy with it and do you see the performance difference?

 

Assuming you went with the 2199 model here, because off the top of my head, I think a 500 HDD -> 128 SSD upgrade is pushing $200 through apple.

But if you want my advice, I'd get the base harddrive and upgrade later. The reason: Apple ships old SATA 3 SSDs (Toshiba iircc), whereas the new MBPs actually support SATA 6s. On the flip side, SATA 6 is brand new hardware atm, and there's quite a few kinks in the firmware. Furthermore, OCZ pretty much has a chokehold on the market and can price their Vertex 3's however the hell they want. So once they get their firmware stabilized, there should also be other brands on the market, making the pricing much more competitive.

So, from a cost perspective. If you get a good, somewhat stylish one, it'll be $100. If you get the dirt cheap models, it'll probably be $70. An optibay would set you back $20. So you have the option of getting last year's SSD + 250 GB more storage in the form of a large, black brick. Or, you can be a bit patient, and shell out about $150 more for twice the performance and technology that'll last (SATA controllers aren't frequently updated like CPUs or GPUs), and a hard drive in the form of something FAR more aesthetically pleasing... built-in!

That's not to say the price is bad right now anyway, but it'll cost you an extra $180 or so versus the default set up.: Amazon.com: OCZ 120 GB Vertex 3 SATA III 6.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive VTX3-25SAT3-120G: Electronics

However, having said that, would you notice the performance between a SATA 3.0 and a SATA 6.0 in real world terms? Probably not. Half of instant is still... instant. It'll only show up in large file transfers/duplications, or if you feel the need to constantly open up and close down Photoshop. So really it's more of a mindset thing. I can't stand knowing I'm shelling out "extra" money for outdated technology.

 

Personally, I wouldn't go with OCZ. They have reliability problems.

Mr. Mysterious

 

thanks for the feedback. The thing is , if apple made it so I could opt-out from getting a harddrive I could have installed an aftermarket one.

But it seems most reliable to me to get the stock 128gb upgrade for 90 dollars from the 7200 rpm drive...

Does anyone know where I can find the benchmarks of the 128gb ssd installed on mac as a stock against the 7200 rpm drive and 5400 rpm drive they have...

 

In short, a lot faster. But really no different than any other SSD vs HDD comparison, why do you need a mac specific?

If you think the new SATA III controllers will help... well, they do, but not a lot. Expect no more than a 10% increase than from SATA II. Again, Macs come shipped with old hardware.

 

The SATA III interface isn't the key issue, it is that SATA III drives are the ones offering faster performance than their SATA II counterparts. The SATA II bandwidth limitation isn't even being met with most SATA III drives but you have to go with a SATA III drive if you want the fastest performance.

That being said, I definitely would not overpay to have Apple install older SSDs when you can find something with a much larger capacity that is also faster for that upgrade fee (going from the stock 5400 RPM drive to the 128GB SSD model they offer).

Just know that SSDs don't revolutionize your computing experience. It just means that OS X boots in a handful of seconds instead of 30, programs load in ~5 seconds instead of 10, etc. It isn't a life altering experience. In fact, I recommend just going with the stock Apple hard drive for now and then wait to see what the market does. As previously pointed out, there are SATA III drives out there but they can be wonky at best. OS X Lion will introduce TRIM support for Mac OS so that will be beneficial and it may take another few months before SSD manufacturers work out all the kinks. By then, you may even be able to buy a slightly slower SATA II SSD for a lot less and go with that.

Either way, there really is no excuse for paying Apple's high fees (every manufacturer imposes high upgrade prices) when you can install this yourself and buy better hardware for a lower price all aftermarket.

 

as a pc builder myself i understand completely that companies such apple overprice for upgrade parts

If there was a way to option out of getting ram and hard drive from apple I would , but there is no way to do that.

That being said , the 2.2ghz i7 15.4 has only a 90 dollar upgrade fee for the ssd which is the cheapest way for me to get an ssd.

But no one can find the write and read speeds of the stock ssd in apple? I know it wont be as good as any other ssd but for 90 dollars it seems a worthy deal

 

It's closer to $160. Even IF you could live off the 120 GB, you can still pawn the 750 GB HDD for $60 or $70 on ebay.

 

I've ube using SSD in my mac for 6 months... I can't remember the last time I waited more than 1 second... SSD is great, however I can not comment on Apple's SSD... I have an aftermarket Agility 2 90GB. I could never go back to a spinning disk as a boot/app drive.

 

SSD, if you're not really into video/photo editting, where you're not constantly having to move hundreds/thousands MB from HDD to RAM, it won't make a huge difference. If you're the every day user, where common application is either surfing the web, opening iTunes once [when you need music], Microsoft Word once [when you need to type something], or opening up a game/video to kill a couple hours, you won't really get $200 worth of speed increase. There's no reason for you to be constantly opening and closing iTunes/Chrome. And if you're like me, I tend to just leave my notebooks running 24/7 instead of constantly shutting them off and on and whatnot. Your CPU doesn't exactly enjoy being heated and cooled repeatedly (nor does it enjoy being at 55C for 3 years straight, but that's another story). Where SSD lends its face is really the random accesses, since even though you're spending 100% of your attention on Chrome, your computer's still processing in the background. So when one of the processes decides to access the hard drive, your Chrome viewing experience might run into a minor hiccup with a traditional spinning drive, whereas with an SSD, you keep on keeping on. Better at multitasking in that sense.

Constant read/write speeds are pretty useless unless you have a specific need for them. I've copied a >1 GB file maybe four times in the past year. Granted, I don't do any form of video/photo stuff. But Eclipse/Netbeans starts and loads a lot faster though, granted I just tend to leave them on. Again, practical use dictates that you really have no reason to open a program more than once a day. You have 4 cores, 8 threads, and >4GB of RAM; your computer's meant to multitask.

 

Ok, I think I made my final decision..

I will get an aftermarket ssd when Lion comes out and I find out which SSD is reliable , supports SATA 3.

Until then I will get either the 750 gb hd with 5400 rpm or 500gb hd with 7400 rpm

Now my question comes to this. I use allot of sound production software , do minor photoshop edits and I want to play games like CSS and starcraft 2.

Will getting the 500gb make the hardrive noisey? Will it decrease the 7 hour battery life?

Is the 750gb slow? Does it bottleneck the i7 2.2ghz cpu's speeds and the gpu

 

It's not just the physical drive rotation speed, but the capacities do matter. Higher capacity = higher data density = less the read head has to move. Granted, the performance increase isn't huge in say, a 750 gb 5400 vs a 500 gb 5400, but then again, a 7200 vs 5400 isn't a big difference either. If I had to guess, I'd say a 500 gb 7200 drive performs on a similar level as a 1 tb 5400 drive (if such a notebook drive exists), so while you do get a performance boost vs the 750 5400, it's not as big as comparing drive speeds directly. In short, at least to me, the vibrations, the heat, the noise, and lower capacity isn't worth a slightly faster read.

Ultimately, we're talking 1-2 milliseconds difference on a 20ms scale between the two, which is years compared to SSD's read times of 0.05-0.1 ms.

 

Also, if you are going with an aftermarket SSD, I don't really see why you would want to pay Apple's high prices to upgrade beyond the stock hard drive. You will only be using it for a month and 5400RPM is more than fast enough for storing media (since you will likely either put the internal hard drive in a USB enclosure or go the optibay route). I would just stick with the standard hard drive that is being offered and not pay to upgrade anything from Apple especially considering that you are going to upgrade that aspect in another month or so.

 

Because 500 @ 7200 is the same price as 750 @ 5400... 0.

 

I got my MBP with a 750gb from Apple.. i left it in there for a data drive. I used a Optibay to replace my DVD drive (since I never use it) with a SSD. Not having the money, I used a friends older and slower SSD, and set it up as the boot drive. Its a couple year old very slow (who knows what) SSD, but its still noticeably faster than the hard drive... they aren't even close.

If you really don't care about having your DVD drive external, I'd suggest you do the same thing... add a SSD on your own using a kit to put it in the Optical Bay slot, so you have both drives in your Mac all the time.