How many songs/films can a macbook pro hold?

Question

I am thinking of getting a macbook (i curently have a dell laptop) and wondered how manys songs/films a macbook can hold before it will effect its performance.

Answer 1

With a Solid State Disk, there isn't a performance issue if it gets filled up, nor does defragmenttion have a effect, however they are expensive in larger sizes and will wear out faster if they are filled up most of the way or any lots of writes. SSD's are very fast but have limited write capability.
A Hard Drive comes in large sizes and thus can hold more at less expensive price, it's scrubable (unlike SSD's) of unwanted sensitive data, it's not shock proof like SSD's. Hard drives are not at fast as SSD's however they are fast enough for most people as RAM amount is really the speed king. They have unlimited write capability.
A hard drive's performance starts to suffer as soon as data is written to the second 50% of the drive as the amount of sectors in each inner track gets less and less the further you get to the center.
Hard drives write their data on the outter fastest tracks and works it's way in, so OS X and programs are usually up front and users files work their way in.
Hard drives usually require a defrag, more so on Windows and less so on OS X (for most) video and audio pro's usually require a defrag to free up drive space and a Zero erase of free space to map off bad sectors because of their large files.
If your into audio and video, a 7,200 RPM hard drive is better for playback than a stock 5,400 RPM drive, it's usually best to get twice as much hard drive space as your ever going to need.
With either a SSD or a hard drive, you need to keep 10% free space for OS X swap space etc., if it's not there the machine will refuse to boot.
If you have sensitive data, then you require a hard drive. If your wallet is fat and there is a large SSD available (500GB - 1TB) and you don't care about not being able to delete unwanted data, then get a SSD.
Since music and movie files are of different sizes, compressions etc., we can't say X or Y amount of songs or videos can be held.
However most of my 8.000 Mp3 193 kps songs are about 7 MB in size each.