Little more looking around, Crucial has their 960 GB at $600 now and Amazon selling it at $540. That's already not much more than the 500 GB SSDs were just a year ago.
This drive (Crucial M4 series) is absolutely AMAZING. I had a couple Macbook Pros that I picked up used from wegener media a few months ago, and ended up with the drives in them.. Wegener had pre-purchased a large order of that drive prior to release and was selling them at around $50 under the list price at the time for folks doing preorders. At the time (august/Sept?) it was a bit pricey in my opinion, even though the $600 tag then, was $400 cheaper than the competing OWC 1tb drive -- $1050)..
But they convinced me to give one a try.. WOW - glad I went for it!
Insanely fast boot times (<15 seconds on 3 different systems!)...
Now, I had already owned one of the OWC 1tb drives, but had a chance to offload it prior to the release (the folks at wegener knew it was coming and kept me in the loop), so I was able to sell it for more than enough to buy the new crucial AND to max out my i7 in 16gb of RAM. kinda nice to have known ahead of time!
BUT....There is no comparison in terms of performance. Even the OWC SSD is quite slow compared to the Crucial. (no OWC's numbers are really not that accurate, IMHO - I've swapped drives in systems and done side-by-side comparison tests on photoshop and Lightroom)..
Now all that said, the SSHD (hybrid SSD) that Seagate puts out is a good contender, if you're one of those folks who craves speed but doesn't have an extra $500 to 'invest'....
I put one in the wife's Macbook Pro, along with a load of RAM.. It is actually only 15-20% slower than my full blown SSD drive! And at $110 delivered (amazon), there's no compelling reason (in my mind) for "consumer-grade" folks to dump the extra $400 into the SSD (if of course, you need the space a 1tb has to offer)...
I've ended up recommending (and installing) dozens of the Seagate hybrid drives this fall for clients, and am quite content with the results. It provides a very substantial performance boost but with only a minimal price bump..
My recommendation:
1. IF performance is your key AND your machine will do well with it*:
Get the Crucial M4 series..BUT.. get it IF **AND ONLY IF** your Macbook Pro is a 2012 or later..
*IF your Mac is 2009-2011, get the Crucial M500.
Here's why: the 09-11 macbook Pros will downclock a 6gb drive to........1.5gb speed...
yup...
But they'll run the 3gb drive just perfectly at 3gb speed (the M500 series is 3gb, the M4 is 6gb)
2. if $$ is the critical factor, get the Seagate Hybrid (SSHD)..
Either way, I'd choose either one of these hands down over the fastest conventional (7200rpm, etc) HDD..
AND, final note: make sure you keep a current Time Machine! SSD drives are significantly reliable.. but..... murphys law still exists!!