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Crucial M500 SSD good for Mac?

M

MacRumoren

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 20, 2010
72
1
Canada
Just wondering if Crucial SSD drives are meant to be used as an external storage device in either a Thunderbolt or USB 3.0 enclosure.

I had a Crucial M4 SSD drive before, it gave me whole bunch of drive issues on OSX, in terms of data corruption and slow speeds. When I called Crucial tech support, they told me SSD drives are not meant to be used as external storage device, something about "active garbage collection" not working if connected to Windows or OSX all the time. It needs to be connected to power over an extended period of time every so often to enable proper allocation of free space.

Do you guy know if the above is true? Can I safely get an M500 SSD drived as an external storage drive? Maybe the Samsung EVO drives are better because they don't have this problem? Or do they?
 
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There's no point in getting an SSD as an external storage drive (at this day and age at least). SSD drives are extremely good at handling very small files very quickly (aka the hundreds/thousands of system files and processing that goes into loading your system or an application). That's why people use them as main/system drives. External storage is usually reserved for music/movies/raw files like photos. These files are normally either compressed (SSD's aren't much better than HDDs with compressed files) or very large raw format files (WAV, RAW images, etc). There is no point in using an SSD for external storage. It's expensive, not as reliable as an HDD, and not much faster than an HDD for external use.

So no, don't use the Crucial M500 (or any other SSD) for external storage. For system use? Absolutely.
 
Thanks for the feedback.

Just to clarify, I mainly need the external drive for storage of RAW files, accessed by Lightroom or Photoshop running on MBP.

My RAW files range from a few MBs to 30MBs, are these considered "small" files or "big" files? :confused:

If SSD is no go, would 7200rpm or 10K drives make a big difference? I've read that especially with Thunderbolt, the interface is no longer the bottleneck, the drives themselves become the issue, especially when they need to spin up from resting state, plus slow random access etc. :confused:
 
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