My wife is looking at this
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TUEJUB2?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=ox_sc_act_title_1&smid=A2TC87EJKQMY9O

I usually go mid-range performance wise, but...

1) she crunches large numbers of images in Lightroom and wants something fast for image crunching
2) her current Core Duo laptop with something like 2GB of memory is now so insanely slow and she wants something that will stay fast for a long time.

Uh... meant to add a question

Will she  benefit from a hybrid drive? I don't know how they're usually set up - OS on the SSD portion and files on the regular portion?

I've never really gotten how I would use a hybrid and how it would compare to pure SSD or pure spinning platter

Debbie says you're going to do better investing in a faster clock and more ram. But what does Debbie know?

I know a guy who writes firmware for proprietary drives, I'll see if I can get an answer.

QuoteThe faster cpu and more ram is a given. I do not like anything that spins anymore and recommend only SSD's now a days. OPS/sec to disk reads are going to be perfectly fine with just an SSD upgrade and the writes to disk are megs/sec so that is her cheapest option. I personally recommend this:

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-75E500B-AM/dp/B00OBRE5UE/


I have three of these in my pc and one in my laptop. You can't go wrong. Best on the market.

CPU/RAM is the next option if this SSD isn't quite fast enough. I suspect it will be though.

Thanks!

She pulled the trigger.

>>I do not like anything that spins anymore... I personally recommend this

500GB wasn't enough for her so she went for a hybrid that has 512GB of SSD and 2TB of spinning platter for the photo archives (in addition to backup external drives of course). Complaint number two next to speed was that she didn't have enough storage with 750GB, so the 500GB drive your friend suggested wasn't going to cut it and the 2TB version is $764. A bit rich. So hopefully having the 500GB on SSD and post-processing storage on the 2TB will give a good speed/cost balance.

>>Debbie says you're going to do better investing in a faster clock and more ram. But what does Debbie know?

That was already decided :-) It was just the question of whether to get the hybrid drive or classic. So now she has the hybrid!

Processor: Intel Core i7-5700HQ Quad Core Processor (6M Cache, 2.7GHz-3.5GHz) 47W
RAM: 16GB RAM DDR3 1600MHz


By my standard, that's a beast. But to be fair, I have 8GB of RAM and i7 of some sort in my laptop.

Doesn't look like that processor will make for long battery life, but I don't think she cares. I suspect a second battery is in the offing.

The old dog is about to become a low-end Linux box.

http://gizmodo.com/wow-samsungs-new-16-terabyte-ssd-is-the-worlds-largest-1723884725

Well, I guess that drive is still cheaper than a new car :-)