I have a MBP pro. It's a 17 inch from 2009 with 8GB of RAM and a 3.06 Ghz processor and I'm running Os X 10.7.5. For film editing, I use FCP 7.

I do feel like the computer is starting to show it's age. It's definitely not as fast as it used to be. This is the primary computer I use for editing. This is partly because I've been doing so much travel late but that will end in March.

I'm thinking about ways to make my experience faster. I'm considering swapping out my hard drive for an SSD hard drive. The other option would be to buy a desktop computer that I could keep in my apartment. Thoughts on whether or not it's worth it to get an SSD drive for my computer?

One other caveat: I'm considering switching to FCP X once I'm settled into an apartment in March. I dont know if that should impact my answer.

Thanks in advance. These forums are always so essential to me!

Depending on the type of work you do, it's not going to help editing a lot and depending on the hard drive you have in there now, you are going to lose free space unless you pay top dollar. The main benefits it will bring to FCP7 is render speed until the effect you are using is processor intensive for the CPU and then you will be back to the same speed you have now. Programs will launch faster and the computer will be faster in many everyday tasks but your editing experience probably will not change much as much of the work is processor based. Most internal hard drives are faster than what we need for common editing tasks. Multi cam will improve if you have a lot of angles to switch but your computer as is is very capable.

I installed an SSD drive into my Mac Pro last week as boot drive and so far I am impressed with the difference over the Hard drive I had been using as a boot drive. Much more dramatic a difference in the machine than extra Ram. I used Super Duper to clone the old boot drive to the SSD and every piece of software seems to be happy (except Dropbox which asked me to sign in again). I would say it is a very good upgrade if you can afford it.

Boot drive yes. Video storage drive no.

Continuing with what Mark wrote, what I did with an older Mac Pro 3,1 was use a SSD for Applications and a hard drive for the video files. Because the SSD was new there was some reserve space so I used that for a few "current" video editing jobs and put the older not-so-urgent video editing jobs on the Hard Drive.

Since I've been waiting to see what the fallout has been from the new X upgrade, one thing that has come up is to finish all the existing projects before doing the upgrade. Well, in my case that is easier said than done. I've got a LOT of "unfinished", or un-archived, Projects. At this rate I'll never get to install the 10.1 upgrade. So ....

And this might help you with your dilemma.

After doing some Internet searching, the solution seems to be to partition the drive. But what I came across that was very interesting, was a comment at the end of this article: Create a Dual-Boot Mac OS X System Disk | Final Cut Pro Training & Classes (http://www.larryjordan.biz/create-a-dual-boot-mac-os-x-system/)

There is a very convincing argument that by doing some selective partitioning one can increase the speed. Very interesting read.

This being the start of a new year means this is also a good time to start a new file system with 10.1.

Oh, and Mr Hohauser mentioned multi-cam. That's my new learning item. Spent a couple days working on a multi-cam Project but I'm currently at a roadblock but that is taking a lower priority to deciding how to proceed with partitioning.