SSD drive for your laptop... Raidon SF2020

The latest rage of SSD drives for laptops which supposedly makes your laptop boot faster and use less power is now available for your old laptops. Raidon SF2020 2F-S1 allows you to hookup 2 CF cards as a RAID 0 drive, giving you up to 64GB for faster i/o and less fragility. For even older laptops with IDE interface, the Raidon SF2020 2F-P1 does the same.

With 32GB CF cards become more available now in UDMA interface and the expected doubling of capacity almost every year, it does make for an interesting boot drive option. Who needs a Macbook Air SSDwhen I can have a Macbook Pro SSD. You can even replace your optical drive with this product like Mr ECheng did. Of course the Raidon is supported by all OS.

I replaced my boot array in my Mac Pro with 2 OCZ 128GB SSDs in a RAID 0, then mounted the disk array on /Users. It has made my system much faster and more responsive. It still takes 20 seconds to boot, but the first 18 seconds are POST, then I get a blue screen and a couple seconds later OS X is completely intitialized. It's pretty amazing.

The other nice thing is I get to use those two SATA ports on the motherboard. I installed the bracket that allows 2 additional drives in the Mac Pro but those bays don't get enough cooling and both my drives installed there failed. Making that mod was the worst thing I ever did to my Mac Pro. Now with SSD it is great.

I think it won't be long before 256GB SSDs are available for laptops. That's probably my threshold. Waiting for the new MBPs to come as well.

Craig

I explored OCZ before but came across these issues:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/fo...isplay.php?f=88

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=280597

I assume you are not having any of those problems?

Craig, thats funny. Eric and I were just having this exact discussion 2 days ago I think he bought 2 x 128GB OCZ SSD as well. Im waiting for 128GB SLC drives, as long as they're somewhat affordable.

I did this when the v2 drives first came out a while ago. My machine is not perfectly stable but it never was. About a week ago I had my boot filesystem trashed but DiskWarrior recovered it. That has happened to me on two other occasions with conventional disks. So...yes I have problems but no, I can't say with any certainty that I have SSD issues. It does concern me.

I haven't had anything like stuttering. The drives appear to work but occasionally the machine gets slow and needs restarting. Once that resulted in an outright boot failure.

If you guys do this you will be astounded at the late stage boot speed. OS X is incredibly dependent on boot drive performance.

Cor, it's interesting that you and Eric were both thinking 2x128 just like I did. I'm concerned with the performance of flash if the filesystem gets too full.

Incidently, I couldn't boot the new, patched DiskWarrior recovery disk on the dead machine. It would boot in Target disk mode and DiskWarrior happily fixed everything over firewire.

Interesting options in this thread and hopefully the price/size of SSD drives start changing down and up, though there has been movement on some of the 64 Gig ones.

Once they get a little larger it will become more tempting, since I am now looking to put 500 Gigs in my 17 inch MacBook Pro and 320 Gigs in my older laptop. (Of course looking at the Raidon SF2020 2F-S1 it could be interesting to try. 64 Gigs of SSD instead of a DVD drive...hmmm.)

Like Craig, I think I am going to wait a bit to see what the next revisions of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air look like. I keep on kicking around getting the MacBook Air, except for a couple of things I would like to see added (another port or two as start.) But a MacBook Air with an upgraded processor and an SSD would be nice.

I did this when the v2 drives first came out a while ago. My machine is not perfectly stable but it never was. About a week ago I had my boot filesystem trashed but DiskWarrior recovered it. That has happened to me on two other occasions with conventional disks. So...yes I have problems but no, I can't say with any certainty that I have SSD issues. It does concern me.

 

I haven't had anything like stuttering. The drives appear to work but occasionally the machine gets slow and needs restarting. Once that resulted in an outright boot failure.

 

If you guys do this you will be astounded at the late stage boot speed. OS X is incredibly dependent on boot drive performance.

 

Cor, it's interesting that you and Eric were both thinking 2x128 just like I did. I'm concerned with the performance of flash if the filesystem gets too full.

 

Incidently, I couldn't boot the new, patched DiskWarrior recovery disk on the dead machine. It would boot in Target disk mode and DiskWarrior happily fixed everything over firewire.

Wow Craig, you're more tolerant than me. If I had 2 other drive failures I'd wipe the disk and reinstall a fresh OS and SLOOOWLY reimport everything new. If that didn't work, I'd bring it back to Apple.

My current OS partition is so stable I have 3 backups. Once in awhile, preferences go bad and I have problems with Flash and Java issues because of that. I think I'll wait for you beta testers to work out the issues first Even though I started this thread

I have drive failures all the time. I've had two in my Mac Pro but both of those came in bays "5" and "6". My mac has trashed its boot drive 4 or 5 times. I've owned 3 Mini's and lost drives in all of them. Par for the course. I don't *know* that I've had a single SSD problem. The nature of these failures makes it hard to tell at times.

Fortunately, I've only lost a notebook drive once and I had warning. It seems I have problems in boxes with a lot of disks. Having known chassis and PC designers, I think it's because they genuinely don't care to meet power and cooling requirements. The mini is a design disaster.

Unless you buy all your hard drives and memory from Apple I don't see what returning the machine is going to do. They won't fix something they didn't sell and they will MOST DEFINITELY erase everything on your machine.

I love my Mac Pro but it overheats and doesn't turn its fans on. I've already lost the video card that came with the machine (those are known to burn up eventually), I've started to lose its replacement even tho it's nVidia, and I've lost 2 hard drives. The machine requires way too much service for a "premium" box. I'm still happier fixing a Mac than running a trouble-free Vista box.

Craig, maybe you need to look at environmental issues. I rarely have drives fail. And it should happen rarely, these things have a MTBF of over 5 years.

I used to have drives fail all the time when I used Western Digital drives. Now, I only use Seagate, and Hitachi (for notebook drives, along with Seagate), and I rarely have failures.

I have 6 1TB drives in my Mac Pro -- the same mod that Craig did -- and they are all still running fine. No problems whatsoever.

Craig, I just ordered two 128GB OCZ Core 2 series drives -- the ones that just came out. I'm using a 32GB MTRON drive right now which is blazing fast and SLC. I'm a little scared to use MLC, but I'll bet manufacturers will get good at producing MLC SSD since it seems to be where consumer SSD is headed.

BTW, I can't find it now (connection too slow), but if you search for "SSD MacBook Pro echeng" you'll find some of my boot videos that show the OS booting with a SSD drive. It is incredible.

See that's funny. I've recently switched all to Western Digital drive because my Hitachi and Maxtor(finally!) drives coinked out. The RE2 GP enterprise drives have been great so far ( knocking on Aluminum). My Seagate UWSCSI 40GB from 95 still runs!

I remember that thread when you and Craig went for the same mod I did to my MP. Craig, do you run your machine on all day? My MP doesn't run for weeks at a time so I've had no issues. My laptop which runs the interface to the house and server is on all day and that may be the candidate for the SSD drives because reliability issues with platter drives. Does any other manufacturer make enterprise 2.5" drives besides Hitachi?

My MP is never turned off.

It is possible that the two drive failures I had in the added bays are just a lousy coincidence. A sample size of two really isn't enough. Eric's drives, if anything, may run hotter than mine and his are OK. I know vibration isn't a problem and I've never noticed the drives feeling hot. The video cards failing is a known design defect and is not particular to my machine. The current location of my box gets plenty of cool air.

Eric, if you have any issues with the 128GB OCZ drives, I'm VERY interested to know.

I watched the MBP SSD boot video. My MacPro boots like that, only tremendously more exaggerated. POST takes longer because of all the extra hardware and memory, then the OS initializes so fast I nearly get whiplash watching it.

I truly believe that PC's should start having boot flash standard and do away with firmware flash. Apple is in a unique position to do that since it requires new hardware, new firmware, and OS support. I've been really hoping that something along those lines is what Apple was referring to in its briefing to investors recently. A combination of flash and hard drive makes complete sense.