Yank my SATA drive for SSD in new Macbook Pro?

[panic]

An unusual circumstance last week led to me ordering a new Macbook Pro quad-core i7 / 1680x1050 15" laptop with 4GB RAM & 750GB hard drive.

I'll be migrating over data from my existing unibody core 2 duo MBP, but the primary use of the laptop for me is Lightroom / Photoshop post processing, needless to say the jump in processing power is going to be major for me. My current rig has 8GB of RAM and I'll upgrade the new laptop to 8GB shortly after it arrives, but I'm wondering how much of a bottle neck the 5400RPM hard drive really is.

My workflow usually is to move recently shot stuff to local hard drive in RAW format, post process and export locally, then move all the files to an external drive.

The only caveat is that I need at least a 256GB hard drive as some of my shoots exceed 25GB at a time (5d2 RAW files = massive amounts of data), and I sometimes keep several shoots locally for a few weeks.

Seeing as how this is already a $2k investment and an SSD will add another $200+, will another 10% cash into this thing really give me a noticeable speed increase?

To answer the question that I know is coming, I couldn't add it to the computer as I built it because I bought a factory refurb from Apple, not "new".

[DanG]

I was going through this with one of the guys at work, running a VM on his MBP and it was slow, so we looked at upgrading him to a SSD. The dealer I get all my apple stuff from at work said to be careful as there's only a handful of brands that will let you upgrade the firmware in OSX without a pain. With SSD's, being able to update the firmware is a big thing for reliability.

That aside, it's going to be a million times easier and less of a hassle to do now as opposed to later.

[theBOYER]

did it with a Crucial M4 SSD. no issues. well worth it.

[Das Pike]

will another 10% cash into this thing really give me a noticeable speed increase?

Yes. The difference is night and day and you will see that once you start working with one. I also have an SSD in my MBP and it's definitely worth the extra coin.

[O_G]

Watch out for the claims you'll see all over the Net that OS X doesn't need TRIM to be enabled on 3rd-party drives because of garbage collection. That's pretty much never the case, although in the case of certain Kingston drives it's fairly accurate.

And, TRIM does work fine on Sandforce drives in my experience, both the current controller and the previous one -- if you have updated firmware.

SSDs don't like to be filled to capacity, so always be sure to calculate some additional space you will leave free. SSDs already set aside some space during formatting for wear leveling, but you'll get best performance and reliability if you don't fill up the disk.

And, yes... ditch the mechanical hard drive. SSDs are much nicer. If you get a drive that doesn't have an OS X firmware updater, plug it into a Windows box and update the firmware before using it in OS X.

[PhReE]

Definitely get an SSD, they are great!

Also you can always get an external enclosure for your mechanical drive and convert it into a USB drive for storage of your photo shoots.

[AudiVW guy]

OWC is the only brand that supports update with Mac OS x.
I used them loved them.. sold the SSD that I had as I wanted a 6/GBs but end up with a deneva2 SSD from OCZ Enterprise 480 GB for my MacBook Pro.. it was on sale.. [ fastest drive out there over 550 MBs read and write. ]

i did not update the firmware on it as I don't have a PC tower to put it in.. bummer - but it is amazing drive really fast and so far so good.. just one word of advise.. remember to enable trim on the drive.

http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322
used for both my OWC and OCZ, works really well.

good luck and enjoy your new equipment.