How much hard drive do I need on the Macbook Pro?

Question

I am buying a Macbook Pro 13" to use for email, internet, word processing and photo editing (in raw and jpeg).  It comes wtih 500 or 750 GB Seriesl ATA hard drive which is way more hard drive than I need.  I will keep most of my photos on an external hard drive and in a cloud and retain about a thousand photos on the Macbook's hard drive at a time for viewing and processing.  I would like to upgrad to the Solid State hard drive but want to choose the least amount of hard drive that would be sufficient for the applications I would like to run and the realtively small amount of photos I want to store on the Macbook Pro.  Do you think this would be sufficient?  Is the solid state hard drive so much better than the serieal ata hard drive that it would be a good investment?

Answer 1

The downside of moving a lot of your storage to an external hard drive is that then you need a second external hard drive on which to back the first one up, and you need to remember to actually DO the backups regularly. I greatly prefer to have a large enough internal drive to store all my files, just because it makes backing them all up so much easier (and therefore more likely to be done often).
As for the downside of SSDs, do they need any more downside than costing several times more per GB of storage than hard drives? Particularly when they're still in their early childhood, are still improving by leaps and bounds, and better SSDs will probably cost half or less than half as much per GB a year from now as they do today? There's more than enough downside to discourage me from buying an SSD now. Thanks, but I'll wait for prices to come down, sizes to increase, the limited-write-cycles problem to be addressed on Macs, and SSDs' long-term reliability to be more definitively confirmed. And frankly, I just don't care whether a file takes half a second or three seconds to open. I can afford to wait 20 or 30 seconds a day.