Building a new Mac Pro tower. SSD really worth it?


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Ok I'm about to build a freaking speed demon of a machine and I'm wondering is dropping the money for SSD really worth it? They are so small and for a solid state drive that is 500GB it'll be at least $1400 :(

I couldn't have anything lower than 500GB for my boot drive/home folder drive since all my apps will be installed there. I could move my home folder/applications folder to another drive but that would defeat the purpose of having a SSD which is that your Apps launch and run faster... thoughts?

Yep.

You could get an after market Intel 80gb or 128gb SSD for the OS and programs and also put in a 1 Tb secondary drive for storage.

Well I'll have plenty of storage... my other 3 internal drives are going to be 2TB each. :) But 128GB isn't enough for applications IMO....

How many apps do you really have? I have more apps than most people (entire Adobe Suite, Visual Studio suite, Office 2010 suite, 3 browsers, ftp, steam, IM client, torrent client, 7zip, winrar, zune player, imgburn, microsoft security essentials, n all sorts of others, probably ~100 apps) and don't even use the full 80GB of my SSD (got 30GB left running Windows 7). I just keep games separate and my OS/main apps load super fast. Keep temporary files/downloads/docs/pictures/mp3s on another hard drive and you shouldn't need much more unless you have hundreds of apps installed. Maybe Mac OSX works differently than Windows though.

I use a 60GB SSD (~$200) for my Mac Pro's boot drive + Applications. Home folder is on a WD640AAKS. Granted, my workflow doesn't include a ton of huge apps, but I use Aperture, Photoshop, and Illustrator along with a bunch of smaller apps. Right now I have 45 GB free on the SSD.

How many apps do you really have? I have more apps than most people (entire Adobe Suite, Visual Studio suite, Office 2010 suite, 3 browsers, ftp, steam, IM client, torrent client, 7zip, winrar, zune player, imgburn, microsoft security essentials, n all sorts of others, probably ~100 apps) and don't even use the full 80GB of my SSD (got 30GB left running Windows 7). I just keep games separate and my OS/main apps load super fast. Keep temporary files/downloads/docs/pictures/mp3s on another hard drive and you shouldn't need much more unless you have hundreds of apps installed. Maybe Mac OSX works differently than Windows though.

I do HD movie and music editing.... Final Cut is a 50GB Install and logic is a 30GB install.... :(

Actually I don't use ALL the tools that final cut came with so I could cut the install down considerably... and I just saw some other areas on my boot drive I could skim down... I could get away with a 256 SSD... what's the cheapest yet fastest 256 or 250 I could get?

I'm thinking of buying one for my mac pro? whats the fastest / cheapest (storage space is not a problem, it'll be for the OS and Apps only) 30gb is fine.

Also what would you need to get them to fit in the mac pro bays (3.5")?

Yes it is, I just upgraded my MacBook Pro to a SSD drive, and the speed improvement is amazing. Photoshop launches in seconds, it truly is amazing.

As opposed to what? Minutes?? :s

A ?400 PC I sometimes use with a SATA 7200rpm drive will open Photoshop in sub 3 seconds

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