Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Mac laptop solid state drives?

The solid state drives (SSD's) are a good option, but expensive. They can indeed fail, just as any electronic component can and they can wear-down over repeated use. Read speeds are typically very fast, write speeds are slower than reads by quite a bit, but tend to be rather fast until the drive starts to fill up or you start doing a lot of randomized writes.

The Apple supplied SSDs are pretty good. I would also recommend buying an aftermarket Intel X25 series or the Corsair 256GB model. Apple currently offers a 512GB SSD and I'm not sure who the supplier is for it or what type of performance it's getting. But I would be seriously tempted to order it if I were buying a new MBP right now. 512GB is finally big enough for my storage needs (256GB SSD was a little too small) and the extra read speed along with the resistance to shock are a great match for a mobile system.
 
I have a MacBook Air with SSD... one of the best computers I have ever owned. Not for doing video work mind you... but the speed and durability are great. Now the link that Tom posted... off the hook. This is the future of raid sets for sure... say 2-3 years, this will be cost effective.
 
The Intel line of drives looks to be a winner, from entry level to enterprise they are pumping out solid drives.

It's such a bummer that its hard to get a small mobile mac laptop with good highspeed external storage. An internal SSD 13/15 MBP with USB3/eSATA spinning storage would be an ideal mobile workstation...
 
that's what PC's are for, they have the highest rate in evolution in technology. Probably won't see features like usb 3 on a MCP till next summer the rate they are going. esata, i don't even know if they'll ever do that, I'm expecting possibly a HDMI port soon though, since everybody and their mothers are doing that on their laptops. Gonna have to be express card for now on a 17 inch MCP. But at least you can get a super speed hard drive, and boot up in .3 seconds :)


Also, just a bit of a warning, SSD in a laptop does not always improve your battery life. Some SSD's take more voltage than a spinning disc. but the performance is really there, do your research on trusted brands, as consumer grade flash can be very iffy, and enterprise quality flash is way too expensive...
 
I have a 17" Unibody and when I bought it form Silverado had the 160GB Intel X-25M SSD, much faster SSD then any of the Apple SSD's offered, way faster!

Custom-MBP17 Apple 17" MacBook Pro "Unibody"

• 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
• 160GB Intel X-25M SSD
• SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• MacBook Pro 17-inch Hi-Resolution Glossy Display
• Backlit Keyboard (English) / User's Guide


You do see a big difference with SSD's vs. spinning disk, no question, but also there is SSD and SSD.


PS: I actually have for sale, but now not so sure after seen that the new MBP's line offer no real advantage.


Any way do get an SSD MBP if you can, especially if you do Video work on the field.
 
Karel Bata said:
Anyone used these? "...choose a solid-state drive that offers enhanced durability."

Do these mean you can safely record while the laptop is being bumped around? And what about read/write speeds? In theory you never need worry about these drives crashing and needing replacement. Or am I wrong about that?
Click to expand...

We are using the Vertec OSD drives in a MiniDeck with Si2k's which have ben very reliable. They are fast too. Im told they need zeroing out every so often to maintain high speeds. If its not done problems occur. Id hope the laptop implementation will be good news.
 
My MBP has a SUPER TALENT MasterDrive OX FTM56GL25H 2.5" 256GB SATA II Internal Solid state disk (SSD), it works fine, much better than any spinning drive I have ever used. But it does sometimes has noticeable pauses, but I am really happy with it so far.Things do get much snappier with SSD drives
 
Very interesting.

The Mercury Extreme Enterprise Class SS would seem to be the clear leader. However I notice "Please note that OWC advertises on this site" and I wonder what exactly he means by 'erase' in his test. Is he simply deleting?

I wonder if this 'slowing down' problem can be ameliorated by periodically backing up, completely reformatting the SSD, and then re-loading the OS. In effect starting again.

Also it seems to me that rather than buy a new Macbook, it might be worth considering buying one second hand, junking the HD, and installing a good SSD. Should come to about the same price but with way better performance.
 
Karel Bata said:
Very interesting.


I wonder if this 'slowing down' problem can be ameliorated by periodically backing up, completely reformatting the SSD, and then re-loading the OS. In effect starting again.

QUOTE]

SSD's are great, they are fast, they boot up real quick, but with the current state of operating systems that is all they offer. The slow down over time because they don't know how to handle the redistribution of memory, so if you do a lot of video editing, or photo editing the excess writing, deleting and re-writing will eventually bog down the ssd drive.

In essence, the mac OS deals with SSD's as if they were physical HD's. For example when you delete a file or edit video on a regular hd that space that was being filled get's deleted and reallocated by the OS because it physically knows that the information is not there anymore. On the windows side, the machine needs to be defragged in order to achieve this same result. Now with SSD since there is no physical disk the OS doesn't understand how to interpret the redistribution of memory so it needs an additional protocol in order to redistribute the memory. This protocol is called TRIM. Unfortunately this is not supported in Snow Leopard which is why as you fill them up over time you will notice a slow down in the read/write speeds. This is also another reason why if you are a person who is doing a large amount of video or photo editing or even DIT work, SSD just isn't necessarily the best option even if the computer boots up in 15 secs.

More about trim can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for the reply.

The fact that TRIM is not supported on Macs is I think a good reason to consider using an equivalent of SECURE ERASE, which I think is probably better for SSD longevity than TRIM anyway, as the most often used memory locations would be in fresh addresses each time you restore the drive, thus 'wear' would be more evenly distributed across the whole drive.

With the appropriate software (if it exists for the Mac) it wouldn't take long to do the first time, and after that you just keep one image of the OS (and a backup) on an external drive. Then after each job is over, erase the SSD and copy over the image of the OS and you're ready to start again.
 
Karel Bata said:
SSD's are great, they are fast, they boot up real quick, but with the current state of operating systems that is all they offer. The slow down over time because they don't know how to handle the redistribution of memory, so if you do a lot of video editing, or photo editing the excess writing, deleting and re-writing will eventually bog down the ssd drive.

In essence, the mac OS deals with SSD's as if they were physical HD's. For example when you delete a file or edit video on a regular hd that space that was being filled get's deleted and reallocated by the OS because it physically knows that the information is not there anymore. On the windows side, the machine needs to be defragged in order to achieve this same result. Now with SSD since there is no physical disk the OS doesn't understand how to interpret the redistribution of memory so it needs an additional protocol in order to redistribute the memory. This protocol is called TRIM. Unfortunately this is not supported in Snow Leopard which is why as you fill them up over time you will notice a slow down in the read/write speeds. This is also another reason why if you are a person who is doing a large amount of video or photo editing or even DIT work, SSD just isn't necessarily the best option even if the computer boots up in 15 secs.

More about trim can be seen here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM
Click to expand...


On this factor I do have to agree, doing tone of very Large Raw file photo editing, after almost a year now, I did noticed a slow down on the processing, but still way faster then any Spinning disk ever used, so still very happy about the extra cost of the SSD, but would be very nice to have a good and safe solution to safely Erase, Defrag or Trim properly the SSD as to restore is original functions and speeds.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top