I have a 2010 Mac Pro. I have a Sonnet Pro PCI express card arriving tomorrow, and plan on putting a Crucial 960 GB on it. I plan on adding a second SSD for the OS. My present boot drive takes 119 GB of room. Will a 256 GB SSD be sufficient, or should I go for a 512 GB SSD?
I am very happy with Crucial M4 and M500 and just upgraded a 512 GB SSD to a 960 GB in my 4 year old MacBook Pro. Also, I am using a RAID 0 consisting out of 4 Crucial 256 GB SSDs in an enclosure.
As each storage location can be written only a limited number of times, IIRC about 3000 times, it's important not to fill an SSD entirely, as then certain storage locations get rewritten excessively and wear out too fast. So, I never fill an SSD more than about half.
Relative to a harddisk an SSD runs very cool and puts less thermal stress on a system. Maxing out memory also avoids unnecessary writes.
I am doing quite a bit of post-processing of images, have several TB of photos. Having the images stored on an external device and not on the system SSD has given me quite a performance boost even for simple tasks such as deleting a bunch of images in the finder.