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starvingartist8

macrumors regular
Original poster
I have a 2008 Mac Pro

I am wanting to put an ssd in there. I don't need to do this just want more of a snappy experience. Would it be best to wait for the 3G from owc to come down further in price or is the current price here to stay for a while? Thanks
 
I have a 2008 Mac Pro

I am wanting to put an ssd in there. I don't need to do this just want more of a snappy experience. Would it be best to wait for the 3G from owc to come down further in price or is the current price here to stay for a while? Thanks

Life is short, eat dessert first. 🙂

I could have waited but I went ahead and took the plunge on two SSD's for my MBP. I love it.
 
Barefeats have some good benchmarks of how much difference sandforce based SSDs make. All the current Mac Pros only have SATA 3, not SATA 6 so if I was you, I'd get a pair of SATA 3Gb/s SSDs, a couple of 2.5" to 3.5" adapters and run them in a RAID 0 config off the onboard controller.


Here's the results for a Mac Pro booting several 6Gb/s SSDs from a very expensive third party card:

http://www.barefeats.com/ssd6g03.html

Here's the results for a Mac Pro booting several 3Gb/s SSDs from the onboard ports:

http://www.barefeats.com/hard130.html

To put things in perspective and truly appretiate how much faster SSDs can be, I barely touch 100Mb/s using a single SSD on the SATA 1.5 port of my Sonnet Tempo card but when that applies to random read/write operations and there's access time in the 10,000s of IOPs instead of several ms, it still more than halves booting and application launching times.
 
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One thing to remember is that no matter how fast your HDD is, it is still slower than the slowest SSD. My MBP boots in about 12 seconds. That's from power on to ready to type. Fantastic...
 
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