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  • 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 :)

Some good RR news...

SSDs -- beware

SSDs -- beware

First of all, I'm a newbie to this forum, so apologies in advance (AIA) if I stub my toe with this posting.

Saw where someone was thinking of dividing a 256GB SSD into 2 separate 128GB partitions, and that triggered an 'I gotta post something' reaction.

I'm not an expert, but it seems that there are NO 'performance' 256GB SSDs for a laptop. If you really want to look at 4K -- or even 2K -- you will probably have to look at the (1) MTRON 7500, (2) Memoright (latest revisions), or (3) the Intel X25-E (not the 'M' -- the 'E'). To the best of my knowledge, none of these come in 256GB. They max out at 128GB -- which will set you back $1500 to $2K±. Intel tops out currently at maybe 64GB (very hard to get).

An SSD DOES NOT GUARANTEE PERFORMANCE. Research carefully -- you could wind up with a hunk of silicon that's slowwwwwer than a 4200 RPM conventional drive.

FWIW -
Serge Polevitzky
PS I have a 64GB and a 128GB Memoright & have been pleased with them.
 
OCZ Vertex 256... playing back uncompressed DPX's HD realtime off my 17 inch mac... Benched at 225 MB/s reads...
 
Everything you ever wanted to know about SSD drives:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1

After reading this article I bought an OCZ Vertex 120 for my MacPro (3.0 x 8) at home - combined with 10.6 = FAST FAST FAST!

My machine now goes from cold boot to workable desktop in 20 seconds, Photoshop CS4 opens in less than 3 seconds, AE less than 10 (with lots of plug-ins), Lightroom in 4 seconds (with 16,252 21 MegaPixel photos in it's library). Apple Mail doesn't even have time to finish 1 bounce and it's opened my mail and about a dozen windows (incidentally, I have over 352,000 emails in it).

I'm waiting for the OCZ Colossus (3.5" form factor) for my work Mac Pro as it's supposed to give up to 4X the performance of the Vertex series for about the same price per GB. Early reports say that it pretty much saturates the SATA bus on RANDOM reads (256MB/s), sequential reads would go even faster if the bus could. This drive is supposed to ship any day now.
 
replying to others (& myself)

replying to others (& myself)

... if you are happy with the SSD you have, that's all that matters.

I wanted small file I/O performance, as I wanted to back up the drive quickly & it is the boot drive under Snow Leopard (and we all know how many ga-zillion small files unix has -- and then there are the 'resource fork files' for OS X to add to the unix mix). So there are a huge number of small files. Don't worry, ext3 and ext4 & NTFS also have a bunches of small files, so those of us in OS X land have plenty of small file company. Maybe ZFS will come to our rescue (same number of small files, but ZFS is reported to have great small file & metadata I/O performance -- we can but hope).

Anyway, you can simplify things if you just need large file bandwidth, rather than bandwidth performance AND a large number of I/O operations per second, or IOPS (for small file and metadata [directory] performance).
The OCZ Vertex seems to work well for some folks & I probably should have mentioned it. Do a lot of research before you dive in. Not just on the drive, but on how you will use it, too.

Again, some SSDs will do well if they have big hunks of data to deal with, and then performance falls off rapidly when they have to start dealing with files in the the 4KB - 16KB range.

... SSDs are a very complex topic -- enter with care.

Beers -
Serge Polevitzky
 
Justin Anderson said:
Clean install of OSX or the card?
Click to expand...

don't know really what a clean card install is, but yes - the OS.
over time you get some drivers in there, just think about the annoying adobe updater. services that poll devices or the net from time to time.
you can't get rid of it, but you can reduce it with a clean OS.
 
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