Newbie - SSD question

Question

Hi, I'm in the market for a new MBP and I was wondering what performance improvement will a SSD drive give me over a standard hard drive?
ALso I'm not desperate for a new computer so is it worth me waiting for the price of SSD to come down and the storage size to go up?
Thanks

Answer 1

That isn't going to necessarily work -- the underlying system powering a SSD versus standard hard drive is different -- your not going to just be able to swap them out yourself, but Apple Service might be able to do it for you. You should read up on the differences on SSD vs Hard Drives before thinking you are just going to be able to swap it out in your MBP. You will not.
As to SSD drives not crashing -- WRONG -- they do crash, just much less likely than a hard drive with more mechanical working parts. Go to the Macbook Air forums and you will find plenty of posts on people who have SSD drives that have problems with them. It's probably a miniscule number of people in the long run, but they are also electronic gizmos that have problems.
There are some differences in speed when you are using something like the Macbook Air that has a 1.86 mghz tops and you are trying to get all the speed out of it you can. If you are using the slowest Mac Apple currently has on the market, you want that SSD option to give you any additional speed you can possibly get. (The 128 GB SSD is also the largest storage option they currently have for the MBA).
The performance differences on recent macbook or macbook pro's with 2.4, 2.66 mghz speed are going to be negligible at best -- milliseconds for performance differences -- if you are really concerned about speed, your going to gain 2 - 3 seconds on major tasks. Is that worth it? You can look at benchmarks with a google search, but it's absolutely negligible in real life application.
A positive is the reduced number of mechanical parts that might have problems. Your standard macbook will have very few problems with a hard drive as it is, but it does give some minor security. However to say across the board they don't crash is wrong. Just a lower likelihood.
The one major difference you would see is the whisper silent operation. A hard drive takes two seconds to "spin up" when you open your lid, or you do a save or retrieve function. You won't hear that noise in a SSD computer -- it's whisper silent -- although at times you will hear the fan running more to keep the drive cool, so it's almost a tradeoff.
At this point in technology, it's really a personal judgement call as to wether you want an SSD drive or a regular hard drive. For all practical real-life purposes, it's not going to make any significant difference at this point in time.