Serial ATA Drive vs. SSD (New 13"mbp)

Hi All,

I'm wanting to upgrade from my old 15" macbook pro to a 13" and I am wanting to know what the difference is in performance between the 750GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm and say a 256GB Solid State Drive (@$500 extra). I'm not a heavy duty user - i.e. I the most demanding program I will use is photoshop CS5, and thats occasional use.

So my question is:
- What is the difference between the 750GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm and the 256GB Solid State Drive, and
- is it worth going for the more expensive drive given my usage - will I notice a difference?

Look forward to hearing from you guys - hoping to buy later this week!

Cheers

You will notice a difference as the SSD will be many times faster than the 5400 RPM drive. Boot times and just general computing will be faster. However, you really need to ask yourself if the additional $500 is worth it? In my opinion, it's not....

And for many read up to 92 times faster according to OWC:-


Mercury 6G Solid State Drives 2.5" Serial-ATA 9.5mm 6Gb/s

Thanks guys, so do wither of you (or anyone else) have an SSD and highly recommend it over the 5400 RPM drive?

chscag said:

You will notice a difference as the SSD will be many times faster than the 5400 RPM drive. Boot times and just general computing will be faster. However, you really need to ask yourself if the additional $500 is worth it? In my opinion, it's not....

Click to expand...

Azza said:

Thanks guys, so do wither of you (or anyone else) have an SSD and highly recommend it over the 5400 RPM drive?

Click to expand...

I work with SSDs frequently and agree that it is a significantly noticable speed improvement across the board with them.

The two questions are you have to ask yourself are:

• Are you looking for more speed or more space?
• Is $500 worth a speed improvement?

SSDs are still not quite mainstream enough to justify the cost in my opinion. If you are OK with doing your own upgrades, I have heard good things about the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid drives which are part SSD and part Spinning drive. 500GB drives of those style are around $150.

I use a 500gb Momentus, it has never let me down and is a vast improvement over the 7200rpm 500gb drive i had in my mbp