A lot of that storage is cruft like old video files from my years of writing about iMovie and old applications and data I’ve never properly cleaned out because it has always been easier to move to a larger hard disk. I’ve grown comfortable having a 500 GB drive - too comfortable, in fact, as I regularly bump up against the limit. The Capacity Conundrum, Part I - First, I had to resolve the question of just how much capacity I really need. Fortunately, that curve is flattening out, and so I decided I was ready for a speed boost. Prices of hard drives have remained low as capacities have risen, while SSDs have been expensive and have offered far less capacity than their spinning counterparts. SSDs have been almost exactly the opposite of hard drives in the key respects of price and capacity. SSDs are not new, but until now replacing my laptop’s hard drive with an SSD hasn’t been practical. #Dupin lite mac osx installFor most other computers, the way to get flash storage is to install a solid-state drive (SSD), which puts the memory chips into an enclosure that fits into a hard drive bay. #Dupin lite mac osx proTo conserve physical space, the flash storage in the Retina MacBook Pro is made up of strips of memory, much like RAM. Unlike a hard drive, flash storage has no spinning storage platters or read/write head skipping about to access data from physical locations on the discs, making data access much faster. The Retina MacBook Pro accomplishes its swiftness by using a fast CPU and graphics processor, but also by replacing a traditional hard drive with flash storage. But experiencing what’s possible and then returning to what’s normal was especially difficult when I had to send the Retina MacBook Pro back to Apple. I usually refresh my computer every three years or so, which has historically worked in my favor (see “ More Bang, Less Bucks for My MacBook Pro,” 20 November 2006). Yes, the high-resolution screen is beautiful, but coming from the experience of using a mid-2010 MacBook Pro, the machine’s overall speed made more of an impact on me.Īs tempting as the new machine is, however, I’m not yet ready to replace my current laptop. Apple sent a unit for me to review for my Seattle Times column, and I was impressed (see “ Retina MacBook Pro: a treat for the eyes, maybe not for the wallet”).
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