The new OWC 1TB internal hard drive I installed in my Mac Pro 3,1 just died and cannot be recovered. This was presumably a good-quality brand new hard drive. Fortunately, I have multiple backups thanks to SuperDuper and Time Machine, so I only lost a few emails that arrived after the previous hourly TM backup and before the disk failure. I'm seriously thinking about a solid state drive to replace the dead internal hard drive. The startup volume that was just lost was this size:
Volume size: 601.61 GB (601,611,190,272 Bytes)
Available: 328.28 GB (328,283,320,320 Bytes)
Used : 273.33 GB (273,327,869,952 Bytes)
An unused, second volume occupied the remaining space available on the 1TB hard drive.
Barring some unforeseen development, I should be able to keep the used space below 300 GB, but I need some additional space for Photoshop scratch and OSX's virtual memory as well as ordinary OS operation. The main applications and their attendant documents and images occupy a lot of room, so it will be hard to downsize to squeeze into a smaller-sized SSD. They are Adobe CS4, MS Office, and VMware Fusion 3 with Windows 7 Ultimate. Also, documents and images have historical value and can't be reduced by much.
I'm interested in advice about what's available and practical in the world of solid state drives. An assist from you experts would be very helpful. As you already know, I'm not an IT expert by any measure, but I use a computer every day in my work. I'm best described as an experienced, bruised user who can't program anything now that MSOffice doesn't support macros.
