Fast boot up time

If you've got less than 4 GB of RAM, it is highly recommended you bring up your total to at least 4 to give your OS some breathing room. However, this will not speed up your boot up significantly, unless your machine has an EXTREMELY low amount of memory installed.

A bigger hard drive will do nothing to speed up your boot. You would need to invest in an SSD drive and migrate/reinstall your OS to it. Even entry-level SSD drives will have seek times, IOPS ratings and data transfer rates (especially reads) vastly superior to high-end desktop HDDs. An SSD will go a long way to help you achieve shorter boot times.

Marv, if I remember correctly, you have a late (or current) model 13" Macbook Pro. The best way to improve your startup experience is with either a faster (7,200 rpm) hard drive for a little bit of a speed boost over the 5,400 rpm drive your MBP shipped with or for a totally different experience invest in a SSD, as the previous poster noted. An SSD will dramatically improve the experience on your MacBook Pro, not just give you faster boot times. Programs will launch dramatically faster if not instantly. In my current model MBP I opted to get a OCZ Vertex 3 SSD (since the current MBPs offer SATA III support) for <20 second boot times and I replaced the optical drive with a 7,200rpm 750GB hard drive with OWC's Data Doubler for disk capacity.

You already have 4GB of RAM (I believe) so, as the previous poster noted, you won't really see any boot time decreases by bumping that up.

For laptop use, I'd recommend looking into the hybrid SSDs. These are basically conventional HDDs with a few addional GB of on-board solid state memory for commonly accessed files (such as OS and regularly used applications). A hybrid drive won't cost as much $$$ as a full SSD and you won't have to sacrifice storage capacity. Choose an hybrid with a 7200rpm HDD and the entire drive will outperform your stock unit.

Thanks i looked into the hybrid seagate Momentous and they told me they were some problems with these hybrid models.marv

The issues with seagate momentous drives was sorted a few weeks back with a firmware update.
A Hybrid will store the most often accessed blocks in non-valatile cache, whether or not this includes the boot files will depend on what applications you use, how often, and how often you reboot.

The OSX boot system is already highly optimised, the only way to make any significant difference would be to use an SSD.

I auditioned a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB drive in my MBP before hiring the OCZ Vertex 3. I didn't have any problems with the unit I tested. It is an improvement over a standard mechanical drive but even after it "learns" how you compute I'd say its only a notable improvement. ...I use SSDs in RAID 0 on my desktop and one in my laptop so perhaps I'm accustomed to them.

In my opinion, there's just no substitute for a contemporary SSD when it comes to performance. ...and if you really want to see a subjective and objective jump in performance I think that's the route you'll have to take.

You don't have to spend an arm and a leg on an SSD. Especially if you have an MBP...just get a small one...say 64GB, if you really want to be economical. You can always put your current mechanical drive in an OWC Data Doubler (optical bay hard drive bracket) and still have access to its space. That way you really do have the best of both worlds.

However, if you don't need the very fastest, the hybrid drives (I only know of the Seagate Momentus XT...as I haven't researched the market) are a good compromise.

Thanks for answering me back.I will look into the 128 SSD as I do really simple computing nothing extraneous at all. Which one would you suggest as I just purchased this 2011 MBP 13 inch 2.3 and 320HD. ? Thanks marv

Well, since you're MBP supports SATA III I'd start with suggesting a drive that can take advantage of the 6GB/s that offers. The OCZ Vertex 3 120GB IOPS Edition is just about as good as it gets.

However, if you're looking for something a bit more economical that will still perform very very well: The OCZ Vertex 2 120GB rocks. I have two of these in RAID 0 (the 3.5" version, that is) and they're nasty-fast. However, if you can afford to get the Vertex 3, go for it, it performs as well as the 2 Vertex 2's in RAID0 (My Mac Pro doesn't support SATA III   ).

I'm recommending the OCZ drives as I've tried others, Crucial and Corsair, and the OCZ's have performed the best, in my experience.

OWC also makes a highly-rated SSD based on the SandForce controllers, the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro and Mercury Extreme Pro 6GB...and there are other brands as well, but I'd definitely recommend sticking with a SandForce controller-based SSD (like the ones I've noted), as they seem to be the top performers now.

Thanks again what money are we looking into buying this SSD?