15" 2.93GHz w/ 256GB SSD. [Q&A]

[adamjackson]

I'm curious to see where you ended up with Apple and your ssd drive issue?

Sounds like you're pleased with the 2.9 over the 2.6 but are you still unhappy with the ssd performance?

So the SSD performance on paper really sucks but I can say that I'm happy with the investment now that I've used it for a month.

The machine is extremely fast and handles anything I throw at it. Gaming performance is fantastic, video encoding rocks and the SSD doesn't really benefit those things but the SSD does rock when I'm staring my day and launching photoshop.

Computer boots in 25 seconds, I have 10 programs that I deem essential auto-start and those are all up in 5 seconds. I then Launch Illustrator & Photoshop in 30 seconds.

Time to go to sleep? No problem, it's done in 5 seconds (including saving your data to SSD in the event of a power loss) and if I want to switch to the faster GPU (which requires a logout) it's incredibly fast to close every app and relogin.

Basically, it's a fantastic upgrade that if it were half the cost, I'd tell everyone to go for it and I'd be the advocate of SSD but at this time with the price point like it is, SSD is merely a luxury that only a few people in the right mind will justify spending money on.

I'm curious to see where you ended up with Apple and your ssd drive issue?

Sounds like you're pleased with the 2.9 over the 2.6 but are you still unhappy with the ssd performance?

oh and no Apple didn't help me out. they don't respond well to "performance issues" if you say it's not fast enough they don't respond to that unless something is actually broken and can be diagnosed.

 

[mckansai21]

Adam, thanks for sharing your impressions and experiences.
I can understand Apple not "sympathizing" with less-than-expected
performance, but what about the regular system freezes
you mentioned? That sounds like a real problem, not just a performance
issue... How did they respond to that?

Also, it sounds like your SSD was a Toshiba -- but no one knows
for sure. It also sounds like the SSDs currently shipping with
CTO'd Macbook's are now Samsungs... but no one knows for sure?
Can anyone shed light on this point?

Cheers

Erik

 

[sascha h-k]

forget all ssd's that offer NO firmware update like toshiba & samsung.

 

[adamjackson]

Adam, thanks for sharing your impressions and experiences.
I can understand Apple not "sympathizing" with less-than-expected
performance, but what about the regular system freezes
you mentioned? That sounds like a real problem, not just a performance
issue... How did they respond to that?

Also, it sounds like your SSD was a Toshiba -- but no one knows
for sure. It also sounds like the SSDs currently shipping with
CTO'd Macbook's are now Samsungs... but no one knows for sure?
Can anyone shed light on this point?

Cheers

Erik

The lock ups stopped randomly. I finally caved and installed OSX as a fresh install and simply reinstalled everything from scratch dragging and dropping from my time machine backup. It looks like doing the recovery from backup was a mistake.

I have no idea what apple uses for SSDs. The Toshiba only shines when I do a "bunch of stuff at once" which is at boot and shutdown. For normal use, the SSD is a waste in my opinion.

 

[bugout]

Its still toshiba.. I got one today that shipped from china 2 days ago.

 

[mckansai21]

Regarding the standard SSDs that come with CTO'd 15" macbook pros:

Thanks for the info. So the 256GB is made by Toshiba. Is
the 128GB standard (Apple) SSD made by Samsung?
Which of the two has the better performance?

Best,

Erik