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Samsung 840 non-pro SSD good for my Mac Pro?

Noctilux.95

Noctilux.95

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 20, 2010
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I have a 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 with 2.66 Quad-Core Xeon.
Currently have one OWC 240GB 3G SSD and three conventional 7200 RPM HD's.
I'm interested in purchasing two of the Samsung 250GB 840's. Good choice or should I go with the pro?

Thanks!
 
^^^^I am using a Samsung Series 840 500GB SSD with an Apricorn Velocity Solo x2 SATAIII PCIe Card. Here's my post describing it:

flowrider said:
I was exactly where you were a 5 weeks ago. The new 6,1 Mac Pro does not look like something I want. The lack of upgradeability was a big negative for me. I felt my 2008 3,1 was not that upgradeable, and I wanted my next machine to be around a long time.

However we differ on the solution. I decided on a new Dual 2.4 GHZ (E5620) Quad core 2010 machine. I felt that the dual CPUs would give the machine a longer life. So far my Upgrades have been:

1. I moved my flashed Nvidia GTX570 from my 3,1 to my new machine, and put the HD5770 in the 3,1.

2. Six sticks of 4GB Ram (new total = 24BGs). The Xeons are three memory CPUs and work best with three sticks (single CPU) and six sticks (dual CPU).

3. Samsung 840 Series 500GB SSD.

4. Apricorn Velocity Solo x2 card for the SSD.

5. I replaced the stock E5620 CPUs with the older but faster W5590 CPUs.

The machine is better than 30% faster than the original machine, and in a couple years when the X5690s become affordable, I may just upgrade the CPUs again.

Your ideas for future upgrades are sound. A RAM Upgrade would be first on the agenda. The Radeon HD5870 is an obsolete card, but the Mac Edition Sapphire Radeon HD7950 or EVGA GTX680 Video cards would be a solid upgrade for you. With the Nvidia card being the better choice if CUDA is important or the Radeon if Open CL is important to you. You may also want to check out MacVidCards store on eBay. He has a great selection of Mac flashed video cards.

Buy a Six Core processor (W3690) in a couple years, when the price is reasonable is also a great idea.

The SSD improves the feel of the machine and really speeds up certain operations. To enjoy the full performance the SATAIII capabilities provide a PCIe SSD upgrade is a must, IMHO. You get the advantages of SATAIII and in addition you get to keep all four internal hard drive bays open for additional storage.

Lou
Click to expand...

I am still quite happy with my choice, and I am enjoying SATAIII speeds. The card allows me to retain all four of my internal HDDs. My read/write speeds are attached.

Lou
 

Attachments

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flowrider said:
^^^^I am using a Samsung Series 840 500GB SSD with an Apricorn Velocity Solo x2 SATAIII PCIe Card. Here's my post describing it:



I am still quite happy with my choice, and I am enjoying SATAIII speeds. The card allows me to retain all four of my internal HDDs. My read/write speeds are attached.

Lou
Click to expand...

You're using the non pro 840?
Both the 840's, pro and non pro are 6G?
 
^^^^Yes, it's the non-pro version, Series 840. You now have another Samsung option that was not available when I bought my SSD. Samsung now has another less expensive alternative to the 840 Pro. It's the 840 EVO. Both the Series 840 and the 840 EVO use TLC memory vs the MLC in the 840 Pro.

Lou
 
flowrider said:
^^^^Yes, it's the non-pro version, Series 840. You now have another Samsung option that was not available when I bought my SSD. Samsung now has another less expensive alternative to the 840 Pro. It's the 840 EVO. Both the Series 840 and the 840 EVO use TLC memory vs the MLC in the 840 Pro.

Lou
Click to expand...

I'm not really interested in adding a 6G Sata III pci card. Perfectly happy with the stock 3G. Staying with what i have, which HD would be the best option?
 
I'm using an 840 250Gb. Works very well.

I recently added a Syba 6Gb PCIe SATA3 caddy card (to achieve the full read speed possible from the drive) and couldn't be happier with the performance. ~430 MB/sec or so on reads.

Even using the built in SATA2 in the MacPro - the disk yielded similar results to the post above and was a huge I/O increase over my WD Caviar Black HDDs.

- CK.
 
My friend is upgrading to a 240GB non pro for his windows rig and I'm having his 128GB 830 for my Mac Pro is the performance of the 830 similar to 840?
 
I got a non-Pro one as well and it sits unattached to anything in my second optical bay. I've bumped into my Pro a few times and frequently plug/unplug stuff and nothings happened.
 
Today I got my second Apricorn Solo x2 and a Samsung 840 EVO. The combo is faster than my Samsung 840 results posted above (Post #2).

Lou
 

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  • Solo x2 500GB Evo.jpg
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DPUser said:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8570/...o-read-performance-bug-coming-on-october-15th

840 Evo owners check this and the article that preceded it.
Click to expand...

I actually did something to my 840 Pro that you're not supposed to. I defragged it completely. I saw an instant read performance increase and faster booting. I didn't benchmark for before/after but actual daily usage proved to be a seat of the pants increase. All apps. launched quicker and boot was quicker. This would probably only indicate read performance. I don't really write to this drive often except for video work. In efforts to protect the longevity of the drive, most all writes are done to spinners. I realize that defragging is counter intuitive to longetivity, but I just couldn't help trying it once. I'm glad I did.

I wonder if the "bug" referred to in the article had something to do with this?
My next SSD for the MP will be an actual x4 Apple PCIe blade.
 
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The consensus around the web appear to be the Samsung TLC NAND needs to be refreshed periodically to maintain read speeds. Defragging tends to move data around on an SSD, thus refreshing some/much/all of the older data.

I'm sure we'll learn more when Samsung releases the firmware patch, scheduled for October 15.
 
crjackson2134 said:
I actually did something to my 840 Pro that you're not supposed to. I defragged it completely.
Click to expand...

How you did that? I decide to do the same thing actually. My plan is to boot from the backup HDD, and then do a complete defrag by iDefrag.

I didn't defrag my SSD for about 6 months now. From the analysis, the whole SSD is full of fragment, which will affect the system performance even on a modern SSD. So, I think it's time to perform some maintenance.
 
h9826790 said:
How you did that? I decide to do the same thing actually. My plan is to boot from the backup HDD, and then do a complete defrag by iDefrag.

I didn't defrag my SSD for about 6 months now. From the analysis, the whole SSD is full of fragment, which will affect the system performance even on a modern SSD. So, I think it's time to perform some maintenance.
Click to expand...

Unless you are trying to restore performance to an EVO SSD by refreshing old data to which access has slowed, there is no reason to defrag an SSD of which I am aware.
 
In fact, I just try to copy an old large file from the Evo, it's much slower than the new file. So, I think it's time to perform a full defrag. Which can serve as a temp fix of the Evo bug, also avoid the performance degradation caused by fragmentation at OS filesystem level.
 
h9826790 said:
How you did that? I decide to do the same thing actually. My plan is to boot from the backup HDD, and then do a complete defrag by iDefrag.

I didn't defrag my SSD for about 6 months now. From the analysis, the whole SSD is full of fragment, which will affect the system performance even on a modern SSD. So, I think it's time to perform some maintenance.
Click to expand...

I booted from a secondary OS X drive then used TechTool to defrag. iDefrag should do just as well.
 
IOs are not free

DPUser said:
Unless you are trying to restore performance to an EVO SSD by refreshing old data to which access has slowed, there is no reason to defrag an SSD of which I am aware.
Click to expand...

For spinners, there's a big cost for track-to-track and rotational latencies needed to access multiple fragments.

There's also the CPU cost in performing a full IO operation per fragment, and latencies in the PCI/SATA protocols for handling an IO request.

While the SSD doesn't have mechanical latencies - it has exactly the same per IO CPU/latency costs as a spinner. Severely fragmented SSDs are significantly slower in the real world than SSDs with mostly contiguous files.
 
crjackson2134 said:
Glad you ran the numbers. I figured most people here would dismiss my expierence, but the numbers don't lie.
Click to expand...

By the way, I don't set my SSDs to do automatic or scheduled defragmentation.

Every few months I check the fragmentation level, and do a manual full disk defrag if there's a lot.

(And, if I mess up and fill (or nearly fill) an SSD I'll immediately check it. That's the easiest way to get severe fragmentation on any disk.)
 
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