[lalaland]

Anyone know where to get the cheapest SSD drives for a MacBook Pro from?

Wouldn't mind replacing a 500GB drive with a 400-500GB SSD drive, however I don't want to pay the prices I'm currently looking at.

Most of them seem to be over £300 with the odd one or just just under that. The lowest so far has been £270 for a 480GB model.

The closer to £200 I can get the better if anyone has any recommendations?

[barky99]

still rather expensive these ssd's .... £300 for a crucial 512mb one Vs £70 for a seagate 500gb 7200rpm hybrid HDD .... ssd's will get cheaper & a hybrid a worthwhile step up for now?

http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard...tus-xt-hybrid/

[lalaland]

Not sure if I'll see much of an improvement with a hybrid over the standard drive in there already?

[rottweiler]

I recently swapped out my hard drive in my MBP with a Samsung 830 128gb and it flys

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-2-5i...3987669&sr=1-4

Don't really need much storage but a would recommend an external 2.5 drive for back ups and extra storage should you require it

These are great
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...=1&s=computers

[clonmult]

Originally Posted by lalaland

Not sure if I'll see much of an improvement with a hybrid over the standard drive in there already?

The standard drives in virtually all laptops tend to be 5400rpm, slow sluggish things. The Momentus XT is a 7200 rpm drive - which on its own gives an appreciable improvement.

And the minor thing that with the 750gig Momentus, its got a fairly large "cache" SSD built in, and works in almost exactly the same way as the "new" Apple hybrid drives - the OS and commonly used applications get moved onto the SSD over a period of time. So you get 90% of the performance of an SSD, but with the storage of a traditional drive.

[lalaland]

Sounds good, but I'm in two minds whether to wait or not. I might hold out and see what the new year brings in terms of SSD prices.

[Loobster]

I don't see prices dropping very fast going forward seeing as they came down a LOT this year. They will drop but probably slowly. I'm hoping that by the end of 2013 we will be seeing 256GB units at current 128GB prices.

I just ordered a 128GB M4 for my work laptop, $92 from Amazon after I cashed in my credit card reward points.

I've decided that I'll sacrifice storage space (currently there's a 320GB spinny drive in there) for quadruple the speed. It's so worth it. For any large work stuff I will just store it on an external drive, or keep it on my main work tower PC, since I don't really need it that often.

[ibatten]

Originally Posted by rottweiler

I recently swapped out my hard drive in my MBP with a Samsung 830 128gb and it flys

Seconded. I put the same part, £80 from Amazon, into an elderly (2007) Mac Mini which I needed to squeeze another 18 months out of. It came with a USB/SATA cable which would probably cost at least a tenner, and a license for Ghost which would have been handy had I not been using SuperDuper! It's transformed the machine for performance, it's also running cooler and quieter, and I can recover the disk and re-use it when I finally scrap the machine.

[Microkorg]

Just swapped out mine for a 128GB Kingston V200+ SSD.
Currently on sale till early Dec in Clas Ohlson stores for just £65!
Originally I'd looked in PC world, but they only sell OCZ, which are trash IMHO.

Didn't notice much speedier start up as my machine has always started fast, but everything else just flies...

Do it!

[Sexbomb]

Are M4 crucials the best or are there better than this? i have an M4 256GB in mine.

[Loobster]

There aren't any that really outperform an M4. You can spend way more money and get a top of the line Intel or OCZ for an extra 10%, if you are that bent on speed. But M4 units just hit the sweet spot for me, outstanding performance, good price.

Best of all, the Marvell controller is very reliable, and was never plagued by firmware problems like the SandForce models.