Need Recommendation for Int. Solid State Drive

[Mako Koiwai]

... for my MacBookPro. Sounds like my HD is going to give up the ghost. It's making bad sounds. Everything is backed up to another drive besides to an off-site company.

What could I get for around $600+

There are various options but I don't know if one is better then the other?

[Mako Koiwai]

I also need the bump in speed and performance. This 3D video work takes up a lot of room and processing.

I'm wondering if I should leave my 500 gig hard drive in for now ... or replace it with a new one, but replace the DVD drive with a Solid State drive as for the system and apps?

I'm going to Indianapolis to shoot 3D mini cam footage for the Discovery Channel ... for 8 days! Mostly I'll just be downloading and storing to external drives, but I'll want to do a certain amount of 3D testing and checking.

[Greg Peng]

Looks like you're in the 240-300 GB range at ~$500. Some of the popular and fast current generation drives are:

Intel 510
Intel 320
Crucial m4
OCZ Vertex 3

Kingston V+100 (throwing this one in here because of its garbage collection that doesn't need TRIM support from the OS)

Look up reviews of other MacbookPro users to check for compatibility issues or performance degradation over time from the lack of TRIM in the Mac OS. I shy away from OCZ because of possible lower reliability, but the Vertex 3 gets very good reviews for performance. All of these should have much better sequential read/write performance (at the 240-300 GB size) than a platter hard drive, which will benefit moving around larger media files.

I'd use the SSD as the main drive in your laptop for the very noticeable performance benefits. If you're already making very frequent backups to external drives, I don't see a reason to replace your DVD drive with something else, unless you want to back up with more redundancy or if the SSD isn't large enough alone.

[Arthur Grant]

Talk to Virgil, he's a hard drive engineer for WD, might have a suggestion for you.

[Mako Koiwai]

Because Mac users have to wait for the next OS, LION in order to get TRIM, it's been suggested that I perhaps buy a hybrid HD for now, that has say 8 gig's of RAM in addition to a regular HD?

Thanks for the recommendations so far!

[Greg Peng]

Because Mac users have to wait for the next OS, LION in order to get TRIM, it's been suggested that I perhaps buy a hybrid HD for now, that has say 8 gig's of RAM in addition to a regular HD?

Thanks for the recommendations so far!

If you're worried about not having TRIM support, the Kingston suggested above should be faster than the hybrid drive, which may not help performance much when you're working with large movie files.

[John Stimson]

I just replaced the drive in a friend's MacBook 13". The HD bay is limited to 9.5mm high drives. We went with a 750GB conventional drive for $90 - anything with higher capacity was also taller (12mm). We did not look into SSDs beyond seeing that the prices were impressively high.

[Mako Koiwai]

Just wanted to let everyone know that a few weeks ago I bought a 480 gig SSD from Other World Computing for my Mac Laptop. $800 something ... but it's done an amazing job of speeding up applications and opening speeds. Photoshop opens in mere seconds now. Laptop boots up on a third of the time. TERRIFIC PERFORMANCE INCREASE!

For something like $15 I also got an external case for the 500 gig drive that use to be the internal HD.

The folks at OWC are very knowledgeable, and I would suggest talking to them before ordering. For newer laptops you can leave in your old internal HD, replace the optical drive with the new SSD and for a few dollars get an external case for your optical drive. This way you can buy a smaller SSD for your operating system and apps, and keep the original HD for storage.