iMac which internal drive

I have speced out my new iMac with everything but an internal drive. I know that Mac charges more but this is a gift and one shot deal so will be using there hardware (son knows the price difference but, wants to keep it all "simple").
This is what I am looking at:
27" Mac i5
4 gigs memory (have ordered Mg from amazon already)
8x super drive
AMD Radeon HD 6970M 1gig video card

I have a 2TB external drive I use for photos and a 1tb external I use for storage and photo backups. I understand it is easy to use these on a iMac so I have plenty of storage.

I am trying to decide between the 256 SSD or the 7200rpm 1tb drive. For those with mac experiance.....What would you do?

go with the ssd

I'd go with the 1TB drive unless your external drives are Thunderbolt. If so, then the SSD.

SSD, so long as you can keep the stuff you really need to work on now on the SSD and the rest on a slower external drive.

People I know who have SSD's swear by them due to their speed. However, most of them have got through multiple drives so reliability doesn't seem to be great. As hinted about 'other' components will bottle neck the benefit of increased read/write speeds so IMO it isn't worth it. You'll have a machine that starts quickly, opens apps quickly but then slows on data transfer.

I'd personally (and actually have) gone with the STD drive in my iMac (i3) and all's lovely in the world. I have the entry model (early 2011 24") and it's far from slow. I use it for editing photos, movies and home recording (I loves my guitars).

Why don't you do both? Configure it with 2 drives. It's only an extra $100 to add an internal 1 TB drive to the 256 SSD.

Go with SSD for the OS and software, keep everything else on external HDDs and clone them for back ups.

crn3371 wrote in post #12882307
Why don't you do both? Configure it with 2 drives. It's only an extra $100 to add an internal 1 TB drive to the 256 SSD.

This.

OS, apps, and LR catalog (if you use LR) on the SSD, image files on the HD. That system will fly.

for lightroom the biggest bottleneck is disk IO and the processor

the SSD makes a huge difference in boot up / application launch + cache for LR / photoshop

I just purchased a new macbook pro and the stock disk did ~70MBs I installed a decent SSD and now its doing 480MBs write / 460 read, the single best response upgrade you can do is the SSD imo

external drives are pretty slow USB 2 is a dog, even firewire 800 is slow (by todays standards), to bad apple doesn't have USB3 but I can't wait until some realistic thunderbolt options come out

if you can swing it buy the i7 and then upgrade the memory / SSD yourself afterwards

tekkie wrote in post #12888196
for lightroom the biggest bottleneck is disk IO and the processor

the SSD makes a huge difference in boot up / application launch + cache for LR / photoshop

I just purchased a new macbook pro and the stock disk did ~70MBs I installed a decent SSD and now its doing 480MBs write / 460 read, the single best response upgrade you can do is the SSD imo

external drives are pretty slow USB 2 is a dog, even firewire 800 is slow (by todays standards), to bad apple doesn't have USB3 but I can't wait until some realistic thunderbolt options come out

if you can swing it buy the i7 and then upgrade the memory / SSD yourself afterwards

I'm considering doing this for my Penryn MBP. The internal drive is a dog, and I know an SSD for my apps and LR catalog/cache would make a huge difference.

What SSD did you go with? I'm considering an OWC.

I got the OCZ agility 3 120GB, its not as fast as the vertex but it uses far less power which is why I picked it, the performance is better than what I expected to be honest

I got it for cheap they have them for 180 bucks -20 rebate so it was far to hard to resist, I looked at the OWC one but I couldn't justify that much difference in price

now I just need a thunderbolt external drive for the raw files, on my desktop I have them on a raid0 western digital black stripe which is getting around 210MBs

in the meantime I am ripping out my CD drive and putting the 500GB momentus XT in there for the raw files but its only ~90MBs so its going to seem slow

Tony-S wrote in post #12880501
I'd go with the 1TB drive unless your external drives are Thunderbolt. If so, then the SSD.

The only thunderbolt externals out right now are very pricy, also a standard spinning drive can't utilize the speed of thunderbolt, so USB 2 and firewire are good enough

Thunderbolt will really shine when SSD externals start showing up with thunderbolt support, until then thunderbolt isn't worth it for spinning media.

sbattey wrote in post #12889938
The only thunderbolt externals out right now are very pricy, also a standard spinning drive can't utilize the speed of thunderbolt, so USB 2 and firewire are good enough

That's why they make RAID-0 arrays.

Agreed, though, that SSDs are the way to go for real speed.

sbattey wrote in post #12889938
The only thunderbolt externals out right now are very pricy, also a standard spinning drive can't utilize the speed of thunderbolt, so USB 2 and firewire are good enough

Thunderbolt will really shine when SSD externals start showing up with thunderbolt support, until then thunderbolt isn't worth it for spinning media.

for a single drive true but its not true for arrays, for the money its another story, I would love to have a raid5 array making these performance numbers

http://www.anandtech.c​om …-mac-thunderbolt-review/6

edge100 wrote in post #12891018
That's why they make RAID-0 arrays.

Agreed, though, that SSDs are the way to go for real speed.

tekkie wrote in post #12891071
for a single drive true but its not true for arrays, for the money its another story, I would love to have a raid5 array making these performance numbers

http://www.anandtech.c​om …-mac-thunderbolt-review/6

The only dilemma here is that those arrays that are available are simply too expensive, and really aren't useful for the average user anyway.