SSD or PCI Express SSD Recommendations for Mac OS drive ?

[Michael Totten]

I'm looking at three options - any insight or experience with these three drives would be greatly appreciated

My current system is:

- MacPro 2 X 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (model 4.1)
- 48 GB RAM
- OSX 10.7.3
- Quadro 4000
- Red Rocket
The operating system is living on a standard 7200 rpm 2TB drive.

1. OWC Mercury Accelsior PCI Express SSD (480GB)
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID

2. OWC Mercury Electra 3G SSD (480GB)
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/SSD/Mercury_Electra_3G_Solid_State

3. OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD (480GB)
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6G/

 

[Brian Merlen]

The mac you currently own only supports 3G Sata. So getting the 6G SSD makes no sense, unless your buying it for your next system as well essentially. Since it has a 5 year warranty on the better 6G SSD, it might work for your next system just fine, assuming you buy big enough storage for your OS/App needs...

The PCI would work fastest, on this system or your next one. It is also consequently the most expensive option. All three would represent a good increase in speed if you put your OS/Apps on them. Since they are all the same size it really depends on your budget.


In addition to this another upgrade you might want to look into is if you can put a better CPU in your tower? I have heard of people doing that with Xeons before, but have no idea which models and what is compatible.

 

[Michael Totten]

The mac you currently own only supports 3G Sata. So getting the 6G SSD makes no sense, unless your buying it for your next system as well essentially. Since it has a 5 year warranty on the better 6G SSD, it might work for your next system just fine, assuming you buy big enough storage for your OS/App needs...

The PCI would work fastest, on this system or your next one. It is also consequently the most expensive option. All three would represent a good increase in speed if you put your OS/Apps on them. Since they are all the same size it really depends on your budget.

In addition to this another upgrade you might want to look into is if you can put a better CPU in your tower? I have heard of people doing that with Xeons before, but have no idea which models and what is compatible.

Thanks for the info Brian.

I wasn't sure about my system supporting 6G - thanks for pointing that out. Would the PCI option be limited by my system like the 6G?
In terms of upgrading my CPU - I'm guessing it'd be easier for me just to buy a new (used) system. Something faster than what I currently have but there's just no way I'm spending 4 grand on a 12-core at this point.
Is there another mac machine (with faster processors) that you would recommend ? I suppose I could offload my current tower and put that towards a newer model.

I'd be a bit nervous to upgrade the processors in my current system - unless it's a relatively simple process.
My comfort level hovers around pretty basic tasks like installing new drives, RAM or PCI devices .

 

[Matt Gerard]

I am using the OWC 240GB version of Mercury drive, and coming from a spinning disk, the speed is amazing. I have all my apps and OS on the drive, with all other stuff on other drives in my MacPro. (Bay 2 for Time Machine, Bay 3 for template content, Bay 4 personal stuff) I don't think that the PCI option would be enough of a speed bump to a) offset the cost and b) compensate for looking a PCI slot that are already in short supply.

As for towers, we just replaced our early 2009 8 core macpros with the new 12core macpros. Minimal speed difference in everything except Cinema4D for me. Final cut is still 32 bit, so its slow as hell, and I don't use primier that often to push it. After effect is pretty speedy with the faster graphics card, (5770), and my boss has a Quadra 4000 in his as well, so that helps.

But, once you go SSD for your OS and app drive, you'll never go back. I have a recent 27" iMac at home that I though was broken for a while, because everything took so long to load and start up until I realized I'm spoiled at work. Here, I'll do a quick test-

After Effects - 13sec from clicking on the icon, used to be 3x that time
Photoshop- 3 sec to boot!!!!!
And a restart of the whoel machine takes about 26 sec, that includes shutdown and startup.

 

[Brian Merlen]

The PCI card should still work at beyond 6g sata speeds because its on the PCI slot bus I believe. So that would be your fastest option as far as SSD goes in your current system. As for investing in other mac based hardware, your options are severely limited since all the Xeons are out of date and that makes it a really bad time to get them, life cycle wise. Personally I looked at mediaworkstations.com since they are selling a Hackentosh tower that has thunderbolt at a reasonable price I am thinking about going that route if I can't hold out for the 2013 Mac Pros. It really has everything I need, tons of expandability, OSX, PCI slots...new ports...but its not a Xeon. I don't like that it only supports 32gb of ram but the fact that it has thunderbolt and USB3 built in can make be look beyond that. He sells 16 cores too, but without native USB3 and Thunderbolt I am not sure I want one.

 

[Matt Gerard]

The pci card will undoubtedly be faster, but by how much? Do you really need to load apps or boot that much faster? For twice the price?
Go with the 3G SSD for the price, and see if that satisfies your need for speed.

I was looking at the mediaworkstations.com site as well. very tempting. I am continually whining about the lack of pci slots and thunderbolt. I just cringe at the thought of haveing to support and troubleshoot it when I should be working on billable jobs.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The Mercury Accelsior PCIe card is the way to go for the fastest performance. My only reservation there would be the precious few slots in a Mac Pro and whether or not you can afford to give one up for the fast storage.

As Brian pointed out above, the built-in SATA host in the Mac Pro uses 3Gbps channels. Which is fine, you will still see fast performance from an SSD, expect about 240MB/s average for read and write from the latest models out there. So, compared to a spinning 7200rpm 1TB~2TB HDD, you're looking a 1/100th of the latency in terms of seek times and you get nearly double the read performance. Write performance varies with SSDs, but generally speaking you can expect it to be about double that of the HDD as well.

Another option is to connect one of the 6Gbps SSDs to another SAS/SATA host controller in your system. If you are running a backup system like an LTO drive, you probably have a controller like the ATTO H680. Of course, that particular card doesn't have internal connectors, but there are models that do. And these controllers are bootable. Areca, HighPoint, ATTO and others all make Mac-bootable SAS/SATA controllers, so you can add something like the ATTO H644 and gain 4 internal 6Gbps connectors as well as a 4 external 6Gbps connectors. Both with the appropriate fan-out cables. And you can boot your system from drives connected to it. Only tricky part about doing this for internal drives is mounting them. You can stack a couple in the lower optical bay and run your cables to there. Or you can use the 4 3.5" drive sleds, but you will need an adapter bracket and an extension to reach the power connector as you have to space the drive away from the onboard SATA port.

Where there's a will, there's a way...

 

[Michael Totten]

The pci card will undoubtedly be faster, but by how much? Do you really need to load apps or boot that much faster? For twice the price?
Go with the 3G SSD for the price, and see if that satisfies your need for speed.

I was looking at the mediaworkstations.com site as well. very tempting. I am continually whining about the lack of pci slots and thunderbolt. I just cringe at the thought of haveing to support and troubleshoot it when I should be working on billable jobs.

I don't need my apps to boot that fast - especially given the cost and as Jeff pointed out at the expense of my last open PCI slot. I'll probably go with standard 3G SSD.

 

[Michael Totten]

The Mercury Accelsior PCIe card is the way to go for the fastest performance. My only reservation there would be the precious few slots in a Mac Pro and whether or not you can afford to give one up for the fast storage.

As Brian pointed out above, the built-in SATA host in the Mac Pro uses 3Gbps channels. Which is fine, you will still see fast performance from an SSD, expect about 240MB/s average for read and write from the latest models out there. So, compared to a spinning 7200rpm 1TB~2TB HDD, you're looking a 1/100th of the latency in terms of seek times and you get nearly double the read performance. Write performance varies with SSDs, but generally speaking you can expect it to be about double that of the HDD as well.

Another option is to connect one of the 6Gbps SSDs to another SAS/SATA host controller in your system. If you are running a backup system like an LTO drive, you probably have a controller like the ATTO H680. Of course, that particular card doesn't have internal connectors, but there are models that do. And these controllers are bootable. Areca, HighPoint, ATTO and others all make Mac-bootable SAS/SATA controllers, so you can add something like the ATTO H644 and gain 4 internal 6Gbps connectors as well as a 4 external 6Gbps connectors. Both with the appropriate fan-out cables. And you can boot your system from drives connected to it. Only tricky part about doing this for internal drives is mounting them. You can stack a couple in the lower optical bay and run your cables to there. Or you can use the 4 3.5" drive sleds, but you will need an adapter bracket and an extension to reach the power connector as you have to space the drive away from the onboard SATA port.

Where there's a will, there's a way...

Thanks for the info Jeff. I think for my needs the standard 3G SSD will be more than good.