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Is the SSD worth the extra $$ on a new MacBook Pro?

6 points by donmcc ↗ HN
I'm a developer and I'm planning to upgrade my MacBook Pro soon. Apple offers a 256GB SSD for $650 and a 512GB SSD for a stunning $1300 over the base model (a 500GB 5400 rpm drive). Anyone have experience with these SSDs? Was it worth it to you in terms of speed and/or battery life?

13 comments

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cpr
Absolutely worth it in terms of overall system speed.

I bought the 128GB drive, though, which was only $300 more at the time.

seanmccann
An SSD is definitely worth investing some money on. I would not recommend buying one from Apple. Get the MBP with the cheapest drive and then buy the SSD from a site like Newegg. You can get a equal quality SSD for about 40% less than what Apple is charging.
donmcc
Ten or twenty years ago, replacing the drive in my laptop and reinstalling the OS would have been a fun project, but I've got other demands on my time now, so I'm planning to stick with what Apple installs. Besides, I understand that the firmware on Apple drives is customized for their hardware/OS.
avdempsey
I just performed this operation last Sunday: bought a new MacBook Pro, swapped out the internal for an Intel X25. Whole deal took 15 painless minutes. I can press the power button, fish something out of my backpack, and glance up and it's done booting. Huge win, but might cause problems with AppleCare down the road.
Huppie
In a previous post about SSDs some people already mentioned not having problems with apple care. This is probably because as of the unibody macbooks the harddrives are meant to be 'user replacable'. (Replacing the default harddrive with an X-25M took me just a bit over 15 minutes, mostly because I didn't have a small-enough screwdriver ready.)
phren0logy
An SSD can be very fast, but note that OS X does not currently support TRIM. Make sure you get a drive that does not depend on this to keep performance from degrading.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, you may want to read up on the issue or wait until OS X adds TRIM support. SSDs will likely be cheaper by then anyway.

alecco
True. But if you keep your old drive you can reinstall the main SSD and have it erased/zeroed. Some people recommend this over X months, depending on disk write usage.

Note: a great way to minimize small writes for developers is to create a memory filesystem and use it for temporary files. With SSDs access time is tiny but the next bottleneck is writing to the drive. Most modern Macbooks have plenty of memory for ramdisks. Perhaps the OP should buy more RAM if there's not enough (up to 900MB for big compile projects.) Again, YMMV.

donmcc
Mounting a RAM drive as /tmp is probably a good idea.
[dead] clammer
Depends completely on the specs of the SSD which vary wildly. Perhaps by the HD model and upgrade it yourself to a corsair P series SSD. I have the P128 and it flies.
alecco
Worth it. Just don't buy overpriced from Apple. Check out the latest Anandtech articles before buying because there are big differences in performance. Replacing a drive is very simple.

For development, since the biggest gains are on small file access performance it makes

There are a few extras/gotchas: disable motion sensor (unnecessary with solid state drives), disable journaling (command line only since 10.6), increase a bit the write buffers. There are articles explaining this on macosxhints and other sites. I recommend you do all this before using the system and moving all your things there. Perhaps keep your old drive as external storage and backup for a while.

Disclaimer: watch out on voiding guarantees, data corruption, and other issues. YMMV

sgricci
I would say upgrading my MBP to a solid-state drive has made the biggest positive impact on my performance, battery-life and startup time. Perhaps the best single computer upgrade I've ever done.
gamble
The drives Apple sells aren't, but my X25 definitely is. An SSD is one of those rare upgrades that gives you an immediate and dramatic improvement in performance.

The only drawback is the cost, and the way it will ruin you for any computer that doesn't have an SSD...

dadzilla
Oh yes. What I did is put a 128gb in my 13" MBP (current generation) and then get a kit to replace the DVD drive with a 2.5" laptop drive. Everything runs very fast, time machine backs up my boot drive every 20 minutes transparently, and I have plenty of spinning disk storage too.