SSD hard drives

ifconfig

Sorry if this has been asked before.

I'm planning to purchase a MacBook pro this week.
I'm leaning towards one or either of the 13" models.
My main home machine (iPhone development) is a 24" iMac.

I'm hearing good things about SSD drives.
I'm a little concerned that the 128GB size would be a little on the mean side for what I need.
Are there any recommendations for UK or US vendors of SSDs which are good quality and more competitively priced than the Apple fitted ones ?

-ifc

Blazer

I can pretty much guarantee that any SSD drive will be cheaper than what Apple/Dell/HP/Acer etc all charge for them...
look at overclocks.co.uk etc for prices..

akadesign

SSD are expensive, anything above a 128Gb is gona cost you a serious amount of cash.

Rulmeq

Apart from the cost, if this is for an OS X machine, you should wait until Apple implements support for TRIM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)

Elessar

Rulmeq wrote: »

Apart from the cost, if this is for an OS X machine, you should wait until Apple implements support for TRIM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)

No need, most SSDs have their own garbage collection in the firmware, which does the same thing.

OP I would highly recommend the OCZ Vertex drives. I have a 120GB Vertex SSD in my MBP and it's a world of difference. I can't go back to regular HDDs. Everything loads instantaneously and large I/O operations are done in a fraction of the time. I honestly think every computer sold should come with a SSD. It is the biggest and most noticeable upgrade to a computer you can make. I highly recommend one. You won't look back.

Got mine from www.memoryc.com right here in Ireland. Good prices there.

silvine

Has anyone here put one in an iMac? I have a 2008 24 inch model.

jd83

Its like everything these will get a lot cheaper soon enough you would be mad to buy ssd now especially the larger capacity ones and especially off apple!

mattfinucane

I would recommend the Intel X25 SSD-m series of drives. I picked one of these up recently for around two hundred euro. It was fast but the capacity I went for (80gb) was nearly always full for me, so if you are in any way involved with media production you will need some serious cash for higher capacity drives.

For me, having all my music and photos on an external drive was ok but with something that requires good seek time and bandwidth you should ideally be able to keep everything on one drive.

Talisman

Have you considered the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive? It's got 4GB of flash memory sitting on top of a 7200RPM drive. The flash memory component uses a technology called Adaptive Memory - It's an algorithm which runs continuously on the drive to identify data patterns. The most frequently accessed data is moved to the flash memory for faster access. It won't give the lightning performance of SSD all the time, but it gives you plenty of storage and a noticeable performance boost over a regular HDD. It's far cheaper than a SSD drive and not that much more expensive than a regular magnetic HDD. The 500GB model costs around €150/$130.

silvine

I wonder will they include them in iMacs when they refresh the line-up this Autumn....