February 18, 2017

Solid State Drives - Fast & Prices Have Come Down


Own 2 Early 2011 MacBook Pros. When my wife’s hard drive failed, Apple does not stock the old hard drives any more. Our machines are now “Vintage”. (I resemble that)

Investigating further, SSD have come down in price. We had 500 Gigabyte hard drives could be replaced for $50 - $60. Got a 500 GB solid state drive for $160 instead. When her last hard drive failed November 2015 the price of the same SSD was about $350. 

Why spend the money? SSD have no moving parts, are much more reliable in laptops, generate less heat, and vastly speed up your computer. My MacBook Pro takes several minutes to boot up. My wife’s take less than a minute. Hers browses the Internet faster too.

If you need more than 500 GB, the prices are still high. 1 TB is around $270 - $350. Would use standard hard drive for large backup due to price. Some manufacturers offer Hybrid drives, but the SSD part is usually too small. Operating systems like Windows and Mac take over 100 GB to operate.

Intend to replace my original 6 year old hard drive with a SSD. Already increased DDR3 to 16 GB. Seattle Laptop (Route 99 & 76th Street near Green Lake) will install a Kingston SSD and clone my hard drive for $240 plus taxes. My wife’s cost more because of the failing hard drive $280 plus taxes. Note - data recovery cost much more depending on the failure. (If you go tell Dan & Mike I referred you)

New 13” MacBook Pros cost ~$1,999 for the same memory. Think will get 2 plus years on our Vintage units before buying new MacBooks. If you want a faster computer, an SSD may be a reasonable answer. Especially as prices fall.

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