SSD & Thunderbolt Totally worth it
There have been some recent deals online on SSD hard drives and wanted to know if it's worth it to use externally? Being limited by firewire 800 on an iMac 2011 would I noticed an increase or are these drives really meant to be used internally?
Or I guess I would need a thunderbolt enclosure to take advantage of the speed?
Thanks
I got a 2011 i7 3.4Ghz iMac with 24GB ram and I just got a LBD 2TB for $400, ripped out the HD's and installed 2 Crucial M4 128GB SSD's in there and installed Lion on it. iMac boots in 15 second and I also have a Pegasus R4 4TB and a quick speed test copying a 5.79GB file from the LBD to the Pegasus R4 unit tool 11.9 seconds. I don't care what the cost is, that is fast and totally worth it.
I'd recommend the follow all from Amazon
LBD 2TB - $428
2 Crucial 128GB SSD's $131 each
2 USB 2.5 enclosures - $5 each
Install the 2TB HD's out of the LBD into the 2 USB 2.5 enclosures and use them as backups.
A second LBD - $428 for pics, etc(If you have the money get the Pegasus $1049)
2 TB Cables.
I use my Internal HD as a scratch disk but you can use it for whatever you want or not use it at all.
Total cost : $1228
Another option is to just get the Pegasus R4 and take out 1 drive and install an SSD. I did get good results from this however I could not get the iMac to boot up fast. With Lion on the TBD with SSD it's starts in 15-16 seconds consistently. programs also load fast. Don't bother with the crucial 64Gb SSD. They are a little slower. I have roughly 70GB's loaded on my LBD SSD. For the best performance you want to spread out your files over several disks. OS/Apps on one, pics and videos on one and another for a scratch disk/caches.
I did not have any issues installing the SSD's into the LBD. 6 screws to open up and 8 screws for the HD's. took maybe 5 mins. Super simple. Lion also went onto the LBD really easily and I set RAID block size to 128k when setting up the raid in Disk Utlity(2 disks appear and you drag them to the raid box. in options set Raid Block size to 128k and hit create. Set up as Raid 0 of course. My Pegasus is setup as Raid 0 as well(4Tb) but I also am running 3 backups. 2 in USB(Carbon Copy Cloner) and 1 in FW800(TM).
The stock LBD SSD is $805 and not as fast as the LBD with 2 128GB SSD's in there so don't buy the stock one unless you are worried about warranty.
I know it cost a lot but transferring a 5.79GB file in 11.9 secs is totally worth it.