External hd or upgrade to ssd?

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I have an early 2011 MBP,17" with 500gb hard drive. I am running out of space. Been thinking of either buying an external drive, which is the cheaper option, or going and upgrading to a ssd,more expensive,but performance will be way better. Wanted to ask, what are some good external drives and how about ssd's,what are some good ones? Want to get something where I am ot going to have to worry about running out of space again. Thanks for the help. John.
 

chscag

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Other World Computing (Mac Sales) sells both types of drives and has some of the best performing SSDs available for your MBP.
 
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Awesome! Thanks for the quick reply. I will check them out
 
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I have an early 2011 MBP,17" with 500gb hard drive. I am running out of space. Been thinking of either buying an external drive, which is the cheaper option, or going and upgrading to a ssd,more expensive,but performance will be way better. Wanted to ask, what are some good external drives and how about ssd's,what are some good ones? Want to get something where I am ot going to have to worry about running out of space again. Thanks for the help. John.

I have a 2012 13" MBP and it came with only 4 GB RAM. It was incredibly pokey with Mavericks so I upgraded to 8 GB RAM and the speed noticeably increased but I still wasn’t happy. I bought a Crucial 240 GB SSD and the machine is now lightening fast. Also, I have a WD My Passport 1 T USB HD and it works great. I had used it for a backup for the MBP but I now have a Time Capsule so it has become auxiliary storage.
 
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I have a 2012 13" MBP and it came with only 4 GB RAM. It was incredibly pokey with Mavericks so I upgraded to 8 GB RAM and the speed noticeably increased but I still wasn’t happy. I bought a Crucial 240 GB SSD and the machine is now lightening fast. Also, I have a WD My Passport 1 T USB HD and it works great. I had used it for a backup for the MBP but I now have a Time Capsule so it has become auxiliary storage.

How is the WD My Passport? Was looking at these.
 
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I'm happy with the Passport HD

How is the WD My Passport? Was looking at these.

I am happy with the Passport. It has worked flawlessly for me. It is only USB 2 though so it isn't as fast as an USB 3 or FireWire HD would be. I haven't shopped for an external drive for a year now so I really don't know what is now available and for how much.

Update:

I just checked Amazon.com and found WD My Passport for Mac 1TB Portable External Hard Drive Storage USB 3.0 with Free Shipping for $69. Seems like a good deal to me. I paid $99 a year and a half ago for the USB 2 model.
 
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Most of the brick and mortar places will match online prices.
 

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