Seagate Momentus XT or SSD? It's going in a 2010 13" MBP.

• I need a hard drive upgrade
• Anywhere from 250 - 320 GB is enough for me
• I spend 80% of my time on my MBP surfing the web
• The other time is spent photo editing. I don't mean iPhoto ... I mean serious stuff on PS CS5, Lightroom 3 and Photomatix. It is the reason I want a new hard drive, my RAW files are quite huge and take time to render
• I like the Seagate Momentus XT because it's cheap for what it does
• I like SSDs because they deliver the best performance
• My priority is for my TIFFs and DNGs to load much more quickly in Photoshop CS5
• Not sure if relevant, but in the near future I intend to install Parallels 5 and run a Windows Virtual machine so I can use Office 2010 (I'm too used to the interface in Office applications, don't think 2011 will cut it for me)

Guys, what do I do? My budget is $400

 

If you're going to use bootcamp, get the SSD.

 

An SSD drive with a size of 256 GB goes for roughly $500-$700 these days, so those will be outside your price range. The Momentus XT will likely be a better fit, or even a traditional spinner at 7200RPM rather than the Apple factory HD's that come in at 5400 RPM.

If you plan on going the VM route, space will definitely be an issue so I'd stick with a spinner rather than an SSD drive.

A third option is to get one of those Optibay mod's that you can use to swap out your DVD drive to install a 2nd hard-drive in. That would provide the best of both worlds so that you could run a VM off of the 2nd drive while keeping the main drive for OS X. Some assembly required with this option.

 

I think that the Momentus XT Hybrid is the best drive out there for the money. The SSD's are great and all, and I wouldn't give it up, but when it comes to storage you are kind of at a draw. Because I knew that I'd be SSD'in my MBP I had to create a media desktop to hold all of my stuff.

1. A laptop in general can't hold alot (without affecting performance)
2. I have over 1.5TB of data
3. A desktop is always handy.

Cutting back to the chase: if you do not have that many files, or they are relatively small... then I'd get the SSD... 128GB-160GB should be ideal to hold Mac and a VM. Adobe Suite does take a good amount of space, but not huge.

At the moment I have a Intel 160GB. I spent $380 on it (on sale from Newegg), and I currently have 30GB of programs, 35GB of music (only music no video to save space), 10GB of files, and then 35GB of windows partition. So I still have roughly 40-45gb of space to play with.

If this is your main computer, and you do not have a secondary computer, then I do not recommend a SSD. If you are a one machine man, the SSD can be incredibly limiting to your storage needs.

Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

Even if you don't need the extra 180-250GB of space, for the extra $30 (250GB XT is $100) it will really come a long way... especially in terms of resale value... I'm a computer broker and I look at it always in the matter of bang for da buck. I've begun to put these drives in the laptops I recondition and they are incredible. My D830 even boots Win7 (look at sig), in 25 seconds...

Good luck.

 

What I was worried bout(when I was considering an XT) was that it would be constantly cacheing between Windows and OS X.

 

Hm... I'm curious about this as well... I've only loaded them with one operating system.

I know that the flash partition would only hold the main OS (it makes sense), but wouldn't the VM just boot off of the rest of the conventional hard drive?

 

Yeah, it's not a puzzler if it's a VM, if it's bootcamp however then yes there's some questions that need answering.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think running a VM will affect that cache at all.

 

has anyone here actually run this HD in a macbook pro 13" im interested in one as well for the very same reason as the OP. but i wont be running bootcamp or windows at all on it.

 

To be honest, I haven't had a use for Windows or Office since I bought this Macbook back in April.

I doubt I'll be needing to run Office on it, but I'm just trying to cover all my bases here. I mean, I've just never owned a laptop and not had Office installed till now. It's kinda odd and there's probably going to be that one time when I do need to have it.

 

I don't think that's what would happen. My understanding is that the Momentus XT knows nothing about OSes, file systems, or files... it just uses the flash memory to cache whichever parts of the hard disk are being accessed most frequently.

So... it could be cache some stuff from your Mac partition and other stuff from your Windows partition... or if you use one OS much more than the other than it'll probably mostly be caching stuff from that one.

 

The best option for you is the SSD + HDD setup

Vertex 2 60 GB SSD for $119 with rebate

Western Digital 1TB HDD for $120

Just simply transfer your raw images from your HDD to a folder in your SSD and load them into Photoshop from there and when your done.. put them back

+ $5-$20 for the caddy

Anyone agree ?

And you mite as well to upgrade to 8GB of memory to futureproof if you still in your $400 budget

 

do what I did, remove the optical drive and slap in a nice storage drive.

 

Why would I do that? I value my optical drive much higher than more storage.

One hard drive bay is enough for me, and even though I don't use my optical drive often ... I like knowing it's there. Just in case.

I think I'll go with the Seagate thanks everyone.

 

why would you do that ? b/c like you said you don't use it often. Bet you'd use your HDD everyday if it was in there. I have the superdrive in a USB enclosure for when I do need it.. once a month. it was just a suggestion though, I've had both a MomentusXT + 80gbSSD in my laptop, best of both worlds =)

 

Well glad that works for you.

For me however: Optical Drive + Storage > Storage + Storage

 

well if your budget is $400 get an SSD. If one of your goals is to load your TIFFs much faster (and CS5 loads faster) than SSD would do the trick everytime. The Seagate will only load that specific TIFF faster if you load the same exact image over and over. So if that's the case you'll see speed difference, if you're loading new images more often, it'll just be like any other 7200rpm drive, although CS5 will load faster since the program will be cached onto the 4GB SSD. Hopefully this suggestion is more in line to what you've asked for in terms of opinions

 

Like Swarmer said the XT will cache the blocks that are read most often. If you work most of the time in OS X and sometimes in Windows, the cache will be used largely for OS X.

I'd get the XT for now and wait a couple of months before buying an SSD. Prices are coming down quite strong. OCZ Onyx 2 should arrive in two weeks. The first samples of Intel G3 is already being sold in China. It's a bad time to buy a $400 SSD now, in my opinion.

Keep in mind though that the XT can cause a slight vibration in the MBP, like almost every 7200rpm drive does.