Lately I’ve been lusting over getting a new MacBook Pro after my 2007 Santa Rosa’s logic board bit the dust earlier this year. I’ve been spending the last month determining whether or not I should think about getting an refurbished model from Apple and save a few bucks, or wait until the 2011 refresh and get something brand new.
As fantastic it is to wait and get the latest drool worthy hardware from Apple, I feel at 28 I’m a bit wiser now than when I was in my early 20s. After a long stint of trying to pull myself out of debt, I’m thinking I’d be super happy with a 2010 refurbished Mac rather than spending more on a brand new model. With the money I would be saving on a used model, I could use that towards getting an SSD drive.
I’ve been keeping up on flash storage drives and their various iterations, a great source for that is Anand Lal Shimpi’s anandtech.com. It seems like now is as good a time as any to pick up an SSD considering how drastically prices have been falling. I’m eyeing a 128GB SSD as my system drive (although I haven’t determined what brand/model yet) as I can get one for less than $150 now. This is perfectly fine as an OS and application drive, and even a decent 40GB MP3 collection. The majority of my data is on external drives and also on a RAID array on another server in our home.
I’ve heard that once you go SSD, you can’t go back to spindle disks. A co-worker and colleague of mine recently picked up an SSD drive for her MacBook Pro and she said the performance is night and day from the 7200RPM drive that came from the factory.