My apologies if this post turns out to be a bit long winded. I've always wanted an SSD in my Macbook Pro. I bought my machine with a 200GB 7200rpm drive and it is rapidly filling up. So I told myself I wouldn't buy an SSD until I could go UP in capacity and UP in speed and fill that need for under $500. A week ago, I read the reviews here, here, and here, saw the price here, and decided that it was time to take the plunge.
This is the newest G. Skill Titan drive. It actually links two SSDs internally into a RAID 0 configuration. Thats how it gets the major speed increase over the previous generation product. Most negativity I read about the drive is actually intended for the old device, not this one, I believe.
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I was at work when the package arrived and I couldn't replace the drive at that point. I was curious, though, about the temperature and noise of an SSD, since this was my first SSD experience. So I left the bare drive on my desk, hooked up power / sata, formatted the drive, and started copying files around. After about 30 minutes of large file copies, the drive felt slightly warm. But by slightly, I really do mean just slightly. I put my ear on it to see if I could hear something. It seemed silent at first, but once I pressed my ear on it, I could hear some sort of noise in there. I dunno... hard to describe... sounded 'electrical' I guess? Definitely not like the spinning of a hard drive. Nearly silent.
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I have the second most recent MacBook Pro. Its the machine that came out in February 2008. It has the Penryn 2.4ghz (3mb cache) chip in it and 4GB of RAM. Pretty shell aside, the main difference between this machine and the newer one is that I dont have the nvidia chipset, DDR3 memory, and faster frontside bus. The newer nvidia chipset obviously also has a different sata controller. And of course... this Macbook Pro doesnt offer easy access to he drive bay. I'll write up a blog post in the near future and link to it with more pics of the surgery, but I didn't find the swap too difficult. Last time I had to really dig into an Apple laptop was when I put a 7200rpm drive in my iBook G3 700mhz years ago. If youre comfortable with digging around inside a desktop PC, you can do this. If youre not, I dont think Id recommend it. My plan was to swap the drives and then use the OS X disk utility on the Leopard Install disk to restore from my original drive.
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The drive replacement was a success! I was bit nervous pushing that power button... was worried the machine wouldn't turn back on properly!
I wanted to capture a before / after XBENCH disk comparison so last night, I shut down my MBP. I booted it up and ran xbench. Then I shut it down, rebooted, and ran it again, and then i repeated. I wanted to run it 3x to see how the machine scored. I had heard that doing SSD tests could provide a lot of vastly different results for each test so when I ran the SSD tests, I did the same process as above, and ran it 3 times. So the scores you see are an average of 3 runs. And I did not see huge jumps in scores between the same tests. All of the numbers were within 10% of each other.
Old drive:
Disk Test 41.51
Sequential 66.29
Uncached Write 105.08 64.52 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 104.63 59.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 30.49 8.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 118.06 59.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 30.22
Uncached Write 10.08 1.07 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 85.15 27.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 77.70 0.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 116.55 21.63 MB/sec [256K blocks]
New SSD:
Disk Test 66.40
Sequential 73.22
Uncached Write 152.42 93.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 118.80 67.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 28.81 8.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 202.35 101.70 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 60.74
Uncached Write 17.99 1.90 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 143.18 45.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1029.45 7.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 431.54 80.07 MB/sec [256K blocks]
So it's definitely not as fast as the Intel drive. Now that being said, it can definitely be debated as to how useful an xbench test really is anyways. Its like those PCMark / SiSoft Sandra tests on PCs. They don't mean that much. Actually, not to get off topic, but man could we really use something like 3DMark on the Mac. I was on the Xbench site and it looks like the last update was in.... 2006!! That was three years ago! Hopefully they can update it. Moving on....
The startup time on this thing is fabulous as well. I timed it 3 times using my iPhone stopwatch application. I started timing it right after the tone ended. I consistently got less than 20 seconds for it to reach a fully booted instance of OS X. I dont have an Apples to Apples comparison here of my previous drive, unfortunately. But two key things that Ive noticed...
As for Application start times, they are greatly reduced as well. I have over 4000 photos in iPhoto and it would take between 3 and 5 seconds usually to start. The app opens up in less than a second now and within a second, my photos are displayed. I tried to time it but by the time i hit the button on my phone it was loaded. Safari is instant. Firefox is close to instant. Even slow-dog programs like Word and Entourage load faster.
Anyhow, this post wasn't meant to say that this SSD is the best or the worst, just sharing my results. It's not as fast as the Intel, but I can appreciate the gigabytes per dollar. And capacity is important to me - I refused to go down in disk space.
And let's not forget the fringe benefit... Now that I pulled out that 200GB drive from my laptop, now my PS3 has a 200GB drive in it
Enjoy! Happy SSDing!
This is the newest G. Skill Titan drive. It actually links two SSDs internally into a RAID 0 configuration. Thats how it gets the major speed increase over the previous generation product. Most negativity I read about the drive is actually intended for the old device, not this one, I believe.
I was at work when the package arrived and I couldn't replace the drive at that point. I was curious, though, about the temperature and noise of an SSD, since this was my first SSD experience. So I left the bare drive on my desk, hooked up power / sata, formatted the drive, and started copying files around. After about 30 minutes of large file copies, the drive felt slightly warm. But by slightly, I really do mean just slightly. I put my ear on it to see if I could hear something. It seemed silent at first, but once I pressed my ear on it, I could hear some sort of noise in there. I dunno... hard to describe... sounded 'electrical' I guess? Definitely not like the spinning of a hard drive. Nearly silent.
I have the second most recent MacBook Pro. Its the machine that came out in February 2008. It has the Penryn 2.4ghz (3mb cache) chip in it and 4GB of RAM. Pretty shell aside, the main difference between this machine and the newer one is that I dont have the nvidia chipset, DDR3 memory, and faster frontside bus. The newer nvidia chipset obviously also has a different sata controller. And of course... this Macbook Pro doesnt offer easy access to he drive bay. I'll write up a blog post in the near future and link to it with more pics of the surgery, but I didn't find the swap too difficult. Last time I had to really dig into an Apple laptop was when I put a 7200rpm drive in my iBook G3 700mhz years ago. If youre comfortable with digging around inside a desktop PC, you can do this. If youre not, I dont think Id recommend it. My plan was to swap the drives and then use the OS X disk utility on the Leopard Install disk to restore from my original drive.
The drive replacement was a success! I was bit nervous pushing that power button... was worried the machine wouldn't turn back on properly!
I wanted to capture a before / after XBENCH disk comparison so last night, I shut down my MBP. I booted it up and ran xbench. Then I shut it down, rebooted, and ran it again, and then i repeated. I wanted to run it 3x to see how the machine scored. I had heard that doing SSD tests could provide a lot of vastly different results for each test so when I ran the SSD tests, I did the same process as above, and ran it 3 times. So the scores you see are an average of 3 runs. And I did not see huge jumps in scores between the same tests. All of the numbers were within 10% of each other.
Old drive:
Disk Test 41.51
Sequential 66.29
Uncached Write 105.08 64.52 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 104.63 59.20 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 30.49 8.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 118.06 59.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 30.22
Uncached Write 10.08 1.07 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 85.15 27.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 77.70 0.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 116.55 21.63 MB/sec [256K blocks]
New SSD:
Disk Test 66.40
Sequential 73.22
Uncached Write 152.42 93.59 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 118.80 67.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 28.81 8.43 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 202.35 101.70 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 60.74
Uncached Write 17.99 1.90 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 143.18 45.84 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1029.45 7.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 431.54 80.07 MB/sec [256K blocks]
So it's definitely not as fast as the Intel drive. Now that being said, it can definitely be debated as to how useful an xbench test really is anyways. Its like those PCMark / SiSoft Sandra tests on PCs. They don't mean that much. Actually, not to get off topic, but man could we really use something like 3DMark on the Mac. I was on the Xbench site and it looks like the last update was in.... 2006!! That was three years ago! Hopefully they can update it. Moving on....
The startup time on this thing is fabulous as well. I timed it 3 times using my iPhone stopwatch application. I started timing it right after the tone ended. I consistently got less than 20 seconds for it to reach a fully booted instance of OS X. I dont have an Apples to Apples comparison here of my previous drive, unfortunately. But two key things that Ive noticed...
- The boot time to get to the main screen in OS X seems to be less than half, if I remember correctly (maybe someone with a similar model can chime in)
- Before I put the SSD in, with my old drive, once OS X would boot up, it would still take a while before everything was loaded. Quicksilver had to load, the gmail checker had to load, Mozy had to load, etc. So even though I could click apps, the desktop wasnt fully there if that makes sense. Quicksilver and all those apps are instantly there upon startup now. I mean its really fascinating to see the difference between the two.
As for Application start times, they are greatly reduced as well. I have over 4000 photos in iPhoto and it would take between 3 and 5 seconds usually to start. The app opens up in less than a second now and within a second, my photos are displayed. I tried to time it but by the time i hit the button on my phone it was loaded. Safari is instant. Firefox is close to instant. Even slow-dog programs like Word and Entourage load faster.
Anyhow, this post wasn't meant to say that this SSD is the best or the worst, just sharing my results. It's not as fast as the Intel, but I can appreciate the gigabytes per dollar. And capacity is important to me - I refused to go down in disk space.
And let's not forget the fringe benefit... Now that I pulled out that 200GB drive from my laptop, now my PS3 has a 200GB drive in it
Enjoy! Happy SSDing!
