Topic: strong opinions on ssd drives

[db]

i just inherited a mac pro and i'm looking into a sled and ssd. been looking at the intel, samsung, and crucial.  anyone with experiences of any of these drives?

[dnsacks]

I've used all 3 with no real problems.  You'll need to enable trim for these drives, which should automagically occur if you use a drive that apple uses/supports -- apple uses samsungs and this is why I picked up a samsung 840 for my mac mini --

otherwise, there's a free app that will take care of this for you too.

[db]

I've used all 3 with no real problems.  You'll need to enable trim for these drives, which should automagically occur if you use a drive that apple uses/supports -- apple uses samsungs and this is why I picked up a samsung 840 for my mac mini --

otherwise, there's a free app that will take care of this for you too.

thanks. in 10-6-8 i think trim is enabled by default. will check.

[dnsacks]

I think you're right, but believe that was only for ssd drives that apple supports/shipped -- see http://www.appleserialnumberinfo.com/Desktop/TnR/Tips/TRIM/TRIMEnabled.php -- the link to the trim enabler program they provided looks to be dead, here's a current link http://www.groths.org/software/trimenabler/

not sure what size you're looking for, but searching for "ssd" at www.slickdeals.net brought up some nice deals that you might want to jump on.

[db]

thanks for all the info dn.  i don't need a lot, just enough to hold the os and some active projects. everything else will be on the other drives.

got an opinion between "pro" and not pro ssds?

looking at this one: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-Series-2-5-Inch-MZ-7PD256BW/dp/B009NB8WRU

[dnsacks]

the comments on this link go through the differences/advantages -- http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1767466/samsung-840-pro-ssd-samsung-840-evo-ssd.html

For my uses, I saw no real advantage to the potential longer life of the pro (suspect the non-pro will be recycled long before it dies) -- don't know if your mac pro has the underlying speed necessary to take advantage of the potential performance advantage the pro sad might offer.  So, for me, going with an 840 eve at $170 makes more sense than the pro at $220.

FWIW, if of interest, it's pretty easy to "roll your own" apple fusion drive using a sad and mechanical hard drive -- see, e.g. http://www.instructables.com/id/Pimp-your-old-Mac-Pro-with-a-Fusion-Drive/

Did this on my wife's mac mini around 9 months ago and have been real happy with the results.

Darrin

[db]

the comments on this link go through the differences/advantages -- http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1767466/samsung-840-pro-ssd-samsung-840-evo-ssd.html

For my uses, I saw no real advantage to the potential longer life of the pro (suspect the non-pro will be recycled long before it dies) -- don't know if your mac pro has the underlying speed necessary to take advantage of the potential performance advantage the pro sad might offer.  So, for me, going with an 840 eve at $170 makes more sense than the pro at $220.

FWIW, if of interest, it's pretty easy to "roll your own" apple fusion drive using a sad and mechanical hard drive -- see, e.g. http://www.instructables.com/id/Pimp-your-old-Mac-Pro-with-a-Fusion-Drive/

Did this on my wife's mac mini around 9 months ago and have been real happy with the results.

Darrin

thanks for the info darrin. saw the tom's page in my own kicking around.

don't know if i'd go the fusion route, my plan was to have the ssd for the os and things i'm actively working on. interesting though.

under the hood it's 2 dual core xeon (4 core) 3.0ghz and 16g memory. so, not over the top power, but good processing juice.

[macdaddy]

Checking in...

[dnsacks]

the fusion drive could still be nice to implement with a 256gb ssd drive, as it would maintain the i/o speed of the ssd while giving you a HUGE cushion for active projects, etc.  Especially if you (like I) have some extra 1tb drives taking up space on shelves.

Only real downsize is that if the mechanical drive fails, it takes down the entire fusion drive (you wouldn't be able to recover the data left on the ssd) -- no big deal if you're backing up.  By default, the fusion drive fills up the ssd first and then sends excess to the mechanical drive -- it then monitors usage and puts frequently used stuff on the sad and not-so-frequently used stuff on the mechanical drive.  So, you have a LOT more disk space accessible at ssd speed . . .

nice specs on the mac pro! -- that a nice piece to inherit and should serve you well for a while

[db]

the fusion drive could still be nice to implement with a 256gb ssd drive, as it would maintain the i/o speed of the ssd while giving you a HUGE cushion for active projects, etc.  Especially if you (like I) have some extra 1tb drives taking up space on shelves.

Only real downsize is that if the mechanical drive fails, it takes down the entire fusion drive (you wouldn't be able to recover the data left on the ssd) -- no big deal if you're backing up.  By default, the fusion drive fills up the ssd first and then sends excess to the mechanical drive -- it then monitors usage and puts frequently used stuff on the sad and not-so-frequently used stuff on the mechanical drive.  So, you have a LOT more disk space accessible at ssd speed . . .

nice specs on the mac pro! -- that a nice piece to inherit and should serve you well for a while

will consider this. thanks.

yeah, i'm pretty psyched about it. good thing apple has decided to support snowcat for a while longer. i am really curious to see how mint runs on it too.

[keytohwy]

I rolled my own Fusion 256/1TB, and I real like it.  It handles which files go where for you.  I used to manage it all myself, but then, I grew up. 

You didn't mention budget, but for best performance, check out a PCIe SSD.  They aren't limited by the SATA bus.  GREAT info at Other World Computing (macsales.com).  In fact, I think their blog from the last couple of days address this specifically, and the issue of Trim on SSDs in Macs.  Worth the read before you spend the money. 

[db]

I rolled my own Fusion 256/1TB, and I real like it.  It handles which files go where for you.  I used to manage it all myself, but then, I grew up. 

You didn't mention budget, but for best performance, check out a PCIe SSD.  They aren't limited by the SATA bus.  GREAT info at Other World Computing (macsales.com).  In fact, I think their blog from the last couple of days address this specifically, and the issue of Trim on SSDs in Macs.  Worth the read before you spend the money.

thanks for the suggestion. it got me started on a bunch of research... my model:


  Model Name:   Mac Pro
  Model Identifier:   MacPro1,1
  Processor Name:   Dual-Core Intel Xeon
  Processor Speed:   3 GHz
  Number Of Processors:   2
  Total Number Of Cores:   4
  L2 Cache (per processor):   4 MB
  Memory:   16 GB
  Bus Speed:   1.33 GHz
  Boot ROM Version:   MP11.005C.B08
  SMC Version (system):   1.7f10
  Serial Number (system):
  Hardware UUID:   00000000-0000-1000-8000-0017F205F2BC

cannot run the proper cat lion/mountain lion (i'm stuck on snow cat) to do the roll your own fusion drive. however while reading about the fusion setup, there seem to be a ton of opinions that find it worthless, so i'm not bumming. the pcie idea kept me busy for a while until i discovered that my slots are pcie 1.0, making transfer rates around 250 mb/s, which are not all that much better than sata ii. so... i think that my original idea of slapping a ssd on the sled and leaving it at that is the route to take. the only other mod i might do to this machine is a pcie usb 3 card. that oughta improve my life measurably. thanks again.

[Ultfris101]

To me the fusion drives offer a "best of both worlds" scenario: faster SSD-like access rates and spinning platter-like inexpensive storage volumes but won't excel at either necessarily.

I expect you'll see a big improvement by just going with the SSD for the system disk. Fast boot and program execution for any binaries stored there.

If you have a place for it a second SSD for data files you are working on might be worthwhile as well. I've had an SSD as my system disk in my main workstation for a while and it boots fast but I was finding Audacity kind of sluggish. I had its temp files on a WD black 1tb drive. I put another SSD in and have Audacity put its temp files on it and also for audio and video when I'm using projects in Audacity or Samplitude or Movie Studio or something I keep them on the second SSD and things are MUCH nicer.

[db]

To me the fusion drives offer a "best of both worlds" scenario: faster SSD-like access rates and spinning platter-like inexpensive storage volumes but won't excel at either necessarily.

I expect you'll see a big improvement by just going with the SSD for the system disk. Fast boot and program execution for any binaries stored there.

If you have a place for it a second SSD for data files you are working on might be worthwhile as well. I've had an SSD as my system disk in my main workstation for a while and it boots fast but I was finding Audacity kind of sluggish. I had its temp files on a WD black 1tb drive. I put another SSD in and have Audacity put its temp files on it and also for audio and video when I'm using projects in Audacity or Samplitude or Movie Studio or something I keep them on the second SSD and things are MUCH nicer.

i do have the space for it, i have four 3.5" bays...  why not put the temp file dir on the same drive as the os and the program?  at this point i'm thinking of one ssd and a fast drive to store finished work ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236624  )

[Ultfris101]

I definitely recommend a second drive for data no matter what. The wd black drives are nice.

I have 2 x 2tb wd green, 1 x wd black, 2 x ssd (256gb OS, 120gb project/scratch). the wd black is also where uTorrent downloads to, i've been keeping finished recording flac sets, lots of stuff. I'm actually in the middle of reorganizing data. Adding video into the mix really pushed my data needs over the edge. I have a lot of downloaded flacsets I can't bear to delete. This is all in addition to a separate Freenas box with 6 1tb drives in a raidz2 volume with about 3.7 tb usable that's nearly full. Just got a 4tb external usb disk. Crazy how big these are getting.

I can't recall if I tried the temp files on the OS ssd or not. The reason you may not want to is you risk contention with OS pagefiles and stuff like that. There's more going on there than just running OS binaries (which you probably know). My workstation is windows but OS X will be similar. Less performance impact of course since it's an SSD, but it's still there.

I also did it this way because the disks are relatively small. I didn't want to risk filling up my system drive if I wasn't paying attention and had a big project going on. The 120gb ssd was my first OS ssd and I outgrew it fast. 256gb is a good size if you don't store a lot of data there. And 120gb is more than enough to work on audio and video projects.

and what really cinched it.... I had the extra 120gb drive sitting there after upgrading 

I had audacity reading and writing to the wd black as I worked recordings and using the same drive for temp files. there were several different configs that would have helped.