MacBook Pro to upgrade but how?

macbriarmacbriar
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
Hi all

I have a Mid 2009 Macbook Pro 15 inch with 2.66 GHz, 8GB, 750 GB HDD and was wondering about the best way of upgrading. Do I ;



1 Upgrade the HDD to an SSD



2 Upgrade to one of the new 15 inch MacBook Pros



The problem does not come down to cost as I budget for an upgrade every 18 months to 2 years. I am looking to get max performance.



The machine is used for Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Windows 7 as Virtual Machine and general office tasks.



Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    kingofsomewherehotkingofsomewherehot Posts: 4,182member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacBriar View Post


    ...The problem does not come down to cost ... I am looking to get max performance...





    Then it's easy ... The new MBP with a SSD.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    macbriarmacbriar Posts: 2member
    I was thinking more of SSD or MacBook Pro
  • Reply 3 of 5
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacBriar View Post


    I was thinking more of SSD or MacBook Pro



    Get the SSD so that when you get a new MacBook Pro you can also just pop it in there.



    Make sure the SSD is SATA III.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    kingofsomewherehotkingofsomewherehot Posts: 4,182member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacBriar View Post


    I was thinking more of SSD or MacBook Pro



    Ok... see, I read that you were "looking to get max performance".



    For system performance, the SSD will make it seem more "responsive"...

    For Final Cut... the bottleneck is going to be CPU, not HDD access... so you won't see much of an improvement while rendering video from the SSD, but the faster/4core CPU will definitely perform better than your old machine.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,435moderator
    Certain SSDs would give a massive boost when it comes to saving large files as they have 200-300MB/s sequential write speeds and over 400MB/s reads means being able to have as many high bitrate layers as you like.



    On a standard laptop drive with 50MB/s read/write, if you duplicated/transcoded a 20GB ProRes clip, it would take 14 minutes regardless of your CPU speed as it has to read 20GB off your drive and write 20GB back onto it. On an SSD like the Crucial M4 with 250MB/s real-world write and 420MB/s real-world read, it would take just over 2 minutes.



    For encoding, you would also see a massive difference between dual 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo and a quad core i7 (more than double the speed).



    SSDs are expensive though (3rd party one is $400 for 256GB) but what some people do is get a 64GB-128GB boot drive and put a large platter drive in place of the optical drive and that would be a 7200RPM drive.



    If you don't want to go that route, I'd say stick with a 7200RPM drive on a new MBP. This is actually the best time to get a refurb though e.g:



    http://store.apple.com/us/product/FC721LL/A



    The recent upgrade wasn't amazing so you get a machine with a full warranty for $440 less. The GPU is a good deal better with double the VRAM but the 6490M is a capable enough GPU and the $440 saving means being able to afford a 256GB 3rd party SSD if you wanted or put in a bigger 7200RPM drive on your own.
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