Teacher needs help selecting right Hard Drive for new Macbook Pro.

I teach middle school social studies and most of my class I run through my personal laptop. We do not use textbooks in my class as they do not meet our state standards well. I instead run our class through my laptop that is powered and plugged in at least 10 hours a day. We use simple things like internet, Power Point, Excel, Word, and simple video editing. I have never used Mac products before but I now believe it is time to make the switch. I plan to purchase a 15 inch Macbook Pro this summer. I believe I want to upgrade the memory to 8GB, but I am unsure about which Hard Drive. Should I get the 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200 rpm or 256GB Solid State Drive [Add $450.00]? I am just a teacher so the extra money would be a hard pill to swallow, but if over the next five years it would be worth an extra 100 a year then maybe I should do it. I don't understand how the 256GB could hold all that is needed and it seems that would be filled up in no time. Can someone please help me? Thanks, Brian

For the purpose you require, no, go with the serial drive.
SSD is very nice, and gives you incredibly quick boot up and data access times, but for your intended use, the $450 would be far better saved. 256GB is a fair amount of space, but if you are worried about that at all, go for 500 or even upgrade to 1TB serial.

Of course this is just my opinion, but I do feel that SSD is still too expensive.

Price wise you get more storage space with the standard HDDs. SSDs are nice but you give up a lot of storage space for speed and the price is a lot higher.

I would save that cash and put it into Apple Care, and an external HDD to back up your computer in case the HDD fails.

Down the line you can always buy a SSD from a third party vendor and install it yourself for a fraction of the price that Apple charges.

If you really need to have a bigger HDD down the line, buy one and install it yourself. Save you a packet.

As you're only doing "simple" stuff like word processing, there really is no need for a SSD. You'll find that the 15" MacBook pro will be blazing fast anyway. SSD are still very expensive technology.

If you really need the extra space, what I would is buy an external HDD. 500gb external HDD are portable and cheap.

I would suggest going with the HDD and getting your self a nice external hard drive from the money that you are saving. I say this because some of my teachers computers in the past have broken/melted/crashed and they lost all of their grading books and such. I would suggest backing up your computer regularly.

- Kyle