SSD Drive replacement for Desktop.... WOW!

I just put in a Intel 25M 160GB SATA MLC SSD drive to replace the dead HDD I had on my MacPro. My MBP has one and it's fast so I decided to boost the desktop speed as well. I had to get a 2.5 to 3.5 SATA connector dock from Icy Dock to attach it to the MaxConnect tray.

I had to clear out a lot of the Apple Software support files in the ~/user/ folders so I could just keep Apps and OSX on the one 160gb drive. Now all the apps launch in under 7 seconds, which for CS4 on a mac is a good thing.

It wasn't a painless install. Disk Utility did not recognize the drive at first for some reason. I restarted a couple of times and cleared PRAM and even a full reset of the computer. Then it suddenly picked up and now I'm typing from it.

Booting and apps launching is super fast. I don't do too many big files myself but PS CS4 using the drive as cache seems a bit faster. I'll probably buy a 2nd drive for direct backup once this drive shows some reliability. I still use my RAID 10 volumes for storage but all apps run from the SSD drive.

The computer feels like it got turbo charged, but the change isn't as noticeable as a MBP getting a SSD.

Still, if you have an older computer which is getting a bit long but not so much where you'd want to upgrade the system, then the SSD upgrade is a great speed enhancer.

Sounds pretty tempting for my Alienware desktop drew. It's got the same processors as my laptop and about the same performance. But I don't want to ditch it yet.

Cheers

James

I just put in a Intel 25M 160GB SATA MLC SSD drive to replace the dead HDD I had on my MacPro. My MBP has one and it's fast so I decided to boost the desktop speed as well. I had to get a 2.5 to 3.5 SATA connector dock from Icy Dock to attach it to the MaxConnect tray.

I had to clear out a lot of the Apple Software support files in the ~/user/ folders so I could just keep Apps and OSX on the one 160gb drive. Now all the apps launch in under 7 seconds, which for CS4 on a mac is a good thing.

It wasn't a painless install. Disk Utility did not recognize the drive at first for some reason. I restarted a couple of times and cleared PRAM and even a full reset of the computer. Then it suddenly picked up and now I'm typing from it.

Booting and apps launching is super fast. I don't do too many big files myself but PS CS4 using the drive as cache seems a bit faster. I'll probably buy a 2nd drive for direct backup once this drive shows some reliability. I still use my RAID 10 volumes for storage but all apps run from the SSD drive.

The computer feels like it got turbo charged, but the change isn't as noticeable as a MBP getting a SSD.

Still, if you have an older computer which is getting a bit long but not so much where you'd want to upgrade the system, then the SSD upgrade is a great speed enhancer.

A fast hard drive can make a huge difference.

I recently installed a 150gb velociraptor (10,000rpm) into my desktop PC. Vista boots in about 25 seconds.

I have OS and program files on there, as well as my lightroom database. The old hard drive has become data storage

How would this compare with RAID 0 ?

Paul C

How would this compare with RAID 0 ?

 

Paul C

SSD generally leaves RAID 0 in the dust.

Of course, Raid isn't usually an option in a laptop, and laptops often have slower drives than desktops anyway, so the difference is likely to be more noticeable in a laptop.

tnx.

Paul C

I think Eric tried RAID 0 SSD in his MBP by removing his superdrive once. I think he's now back to 1 SSD boot drive and 1 HDD as storage, which is what I'm doing.

Drew -- incorrect! I am RAID 0 SSD in my MBP still. I love the thing.

Drew -- incorrect! I am RAID 0 SSD in my MBP still. I love the thing.

I would be scared to RAID 0, even with SSD, in one of my laptops - or at least one the I cannot afford to have go down, but the ones the I cannot afford to go down are the only ones I would consider anyway I have thought about doing that for some things, and wanted to try to RAID 0 some SSDs in the tower - and smile just thinking about how quick it would be. Right now I am holding off and waiting for some more price drops on the SSD side of things before taking the plunge, though I am very tempted to put an SSD in the laptop and using the SuperDrive bay for a larger storage drive.

Bah. I'm fully backed up pretty much all the time, so I'm not worried about it failing. It is extremely fast, and that makes up for it!

I don't mind using a RAID 0 at home where I can easily just switch drives. On the road with a laptop, one dead drive means death for the RAID 0. My 120GB SSD backs up to a partition on the HDD, thus giving me 2 bootable volumes on the road for redundancy. Unlike Eric, I'm a lot less fastidious about backing up boot volumes, only concentrating on work files.

SSD is a nice way to upgrade an aging system. The problem with SSD is they do wear out after some time having a finite number of writes. The great thing is when it does fail, it'll go to Read Only mode. Also one has to be careful about the ~/library/ folders as some stupid programs will only access from the actual folder. I'm still trying to figure out how to move my Garmin Maps (15gb) out of the /library/ folder since OSX won't recognize aliases (thanks Unix!). If I have to put a damn data fork for everything that needs to be aliased, I'll just give up.

Drew -

I've gotten Mac OS X to recognize aliases for system stuff by using command line symbolic link ("ln -s") instead of Mac OS X alias. On my Mac Pro, I've mapped all of my swap directories to a second tiny, relatively inexpensive SSD. No problems.

Thanks Eric! You da 4th bestest!

Update I used Cocktail to make the symbolic links... got too lazy for Terminal