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Solid State Hardrive in MBP?

E

Emrtr4

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 6, 2006
186
0
This is not a question about VRam or Intel on board flash memory, this is a question about replacing an actual MBP hardrive with a solid state drive.

If you had your choice of a 250 gig 5400 RPM drive or a 64 gig SSD which would you pick or recomend?

I am planning on buying a MBP when Santa Rosa comes out (my Powerbook is still hanging in there). I posted before about a 300 gig hardrive, storage would be great for me but if I would have amazing performance with a 32-64gig solid state drive that would also be appealing. I realize that solid state drives being released this year will run from $300-$700 dollars but I would be willing to pay the price of the 3 gigs of Ram in the MBP ($575) for a solid state drive if the performance was good enough.


My question is, would the performance difference be worth the price? I am a heavy multitasker and I have a massive itunes library and do Final CUT HD and Aperature work. I would love to have all of my data with me on a big hardrive, but if the mac comes with built in flash memory on the logic board (via Centrino Pro) would I see a huge performance differance than with a 5400 RPM drive. More importantly how big of a difference would there be in the battery life with a SSD and a regular hardrive?


Thanks, also has anyone done this yet?
 
I'd still prefer a 240gb drive of course. Do you realise that formatted capacities are a lot less than advertised?

So that 64GB drive may end up being only 60GB.

Then OS X eats up 1/3 of it together with all preinstalled applications... next I just copy in my mp3 collection (yay to Apple lossless) and my 3-4gb of emails and I am all good to throw my computer out of the window :cool:

Oh and if you get EyeTV on your Mac, the buffer alone eats up quite a significant number of gigs if you want to have a decent length buffer! While normal hard drives are more vulnerable to physical damage it is not like flash drives are that great either (cue in the many customer woes on mysteriously dying Sandisks on Amazon), and for the price per gig magnetic disk will always win.
 
Emrtr4 said:
If you had your choice of a 250 gig 5400 RPM drive or a 64 gig SSD which would you pick or recomend?
Click to expand...
I'd rather have a hybrid like the Samsung FlashON drives. You then get the best of both worlds, you boot off the flash drive and store data on there and when it gets full it spins up the hard drive and writes the data to that.

Sean :)
 
andysc said:
Sign me up for one. lol.
Click to expand...

DId you see the price of that thing??? At this moment it will run you a (low) estimated 12 800 $. You can buy about a million terabyte sized drives with that kind of money and put them all in raids with eachother and that will be faster for sure (although not portable)
 
thats not what I am interested in. I think me and the OP are interesting in the advantages this would bring over a standard drive.

60 gigs is more then enough storage for me for everyday tasks. I would keep data that I no longer need daily and just rotate music on a external firewire drive. I can definitly live with a 60 gig drive if the benefits are there. So please, someone share the benefits this could bring.
 
BigPrince said:
thats not what I am interested in. I think me and the OP are interesting in the advantages this would bring over a standard drive.

60 gigs is more then enough storage for me for everyday tasks. I would keep data that I no longer need daily and just rotate music on a external firewire drive. I can definitly live with a 60 gig drive if the benefits are there. So please, someone share the benefits this could bring.
Click to expand...

I think it would perform every task incredibly fast. It would be sort of like having RAM as your hard drive. Also, as there is no disk to spin (or spin up/down) you would probably have largely improved battery life. To top it off, I think these drives are also very resilient and would never physically break on you.

One negative side is that apparently they have al imit of read/write cycles they can withstand, and that number is relatively low compared to a normal hard drive. I'd be wary of this when buying one of these drives. Hopefully the new ones have fixed this problem.
 
f1400 said:
I think it would perform every task incredibly fast. It would be sort of like having RAM as your hard drive. Also, as there is no disk to spin (or spin up/down) you would probably have largely improved battery life. To top it off, I think these drives are also very resilient and would never physically break on you.

One negative side is that apparently they have al imit of read/write cycles they can withstand, and that number is relatively low compared to a normal hard drive. I'd be wary of this when buying one of these drives. Hopefully the new ones have fixed this problem.
Click to expand...

I read that the limit is 100,000 read/write cycles. I have no idea if that's a lot or a little. I know that it's a lot less than the standard HDD, but I don't know how many read/write cycles a HDD has.
 
dvader said:
I read that the limit is 100,000 read/write cycles. I have no idea if that's a lot or a little. I know that it's a lot less than the standard HDD, but I don't know how many read/write cycles a HDD has.
Click to expand...

Apparently 100 000 is very little, I'm not sure how much a regular hard drive has but I heard with decent usage 100 000 would last less than a year (I think) which counters the fact that these hard drives are more sturdy. I would personally just wait until they improve them sufficiently and lower the prices.
 
f1400 said:
Apparently 100 000 is very little, I'm not sure how much a regular hard drive has but I heard with decent usage 100 000 would last less than a year (I think) which counters the fact that these hard drives are more sturdy. I would personally just wait until they improve them sufficiently and lower the prices.
Click to expand...
Specifially in MacWorld mag, I read that the price of Solid State drives are decreasing at a fast rate. By 2010, they might sell them at a $1 per gig.

Still, I don't think they addressed the issue of the limited number of read/write cycles. I think that's just as important an issue as the price. I'm wondering if people are working at improving that area. I'm sure they are, but I just haven't heard any projections like I did with the prices.
 
dvader said:
Specifially in MacWorld mag, I read that the price of Solid State drives are decreasing at a fast rate. By 2010, they might sell them at a $1 per gig.

Still, I don't think they addressed the issue of the limited number of read/write cycles. I think that's just as important an issue as the price. I'm wondering if people are working at improving that area. I'm sure they are, but I just haven't heard any projections like I did with the prices.
Click to expand...

Never thought about the read/write cycles limitation. That is a deciding factor. Who would want an expensive paperweight in a few years.
 
dvader said:
Specifially in MacWorld mag, I read that the price of Solid State drives are decreasing at a fast rate. By 2010, they might sell them at a $1 per gig.

Still, I don't think they addressed the issue of the limited number of read/write cycles. I think that's just as important an issue as the price. I'm wondering if people are working at improving that area. I'm sure they are, but I just haven't heard any projections like I did with the prices.
Click to expand...


Check this out for info on read/write endurance:

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

for the lazy:
"endurance for the disk as "greater than 85 years assuming 100G / day erase/write cycles" - which involves overwriting the disk 3 times a day."
 
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