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Fastest SSD

Apple Corps -- maybe look for a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter or SATA - ESATA extender

check out this article:

http://macenstein.com/default/archives/678

What are you doing with your four bays? A Mac Pro that needs extra hard drive space... one can only dream. Let me know if I can help you with any other info. My only rig is a MBP, so I've learned as much as I can about external transfer.

I'm going to try two X25-Es in RAID 0 (one in an MCE OptiBay) on Friday and I'll let you guys know how that goes.
 
percival504 - my Quad MacPro is good to go - I don't even use the external drive enclosure anymore. I mentioned it only in that it confirmed (in my mind) that no chipset was involved in the external enclosure for my WD Raptor drives.

My plan is to purchase a fast SSD > put it an external enclosure > cable it to my MBP via an ExpressCard/34 (which will have a chipset in it).

My use for all this speed is primarily high resolution imagery and 1080p HD video being shown to busy (sometimes impatient) executives. There is always the debate as to where the "bottleneck" is (cpu / gpu / memory & bus / hard drive). In the MBP I suspect the hard drive will be the slowest component.

A a secondary consideration, I the fast boot time is of value - the day rarely goes as "scheduled" and I don't like to carry the laptop around in sleep mode - some people have experienced their machine awakening while closed with a near meltdown happening.

So - sounds like this can be done.
 
You're definitely right -- I love the V-Raptors; expresscard/34 speed is limited

though. I don't think it'll limit your iops and probably not boot speed (?), but it'll limit your throughput. As I understand it (from Addonics and Sonnet), the Silicon Image and JMicron cards top out at ~ 140 MB/s. From my experience, they are correct. When I tested my four disk array w/ a Jmicron card and then a Marvell card I found that the JMicron card topped out at about 117 while the Marvell card (which I'm testing as I write this and saw 195 from 2-100 MB) has on occasion topped out at 197 MB/s. In fact, when I striped two X25-E(s) externally and used a JMicron card, the performance was poorer than one internal X25-E on a 4,1 MBP (SATA 1.5/I, of course).

For me, every 6 minutes is worth $25.00 (literally) time is money and so speed is critical. BTW: the Marvell card is a Sonnet Tempo SATA Pro -- its about $300.00, but if portable speed is critical, try it out (I love mine). Also, Addonics makes a lare-gish, but still portable, 4 disk array (there are port multiplied arrays and a new array w/ hardware raid (the other port-multiplied arrays just allow software RAID and require the use of a Steelvine Manager or disk manager and thus CPU overhead). I don't think the hardware RAID 4 disk array is on their website yet, but there's a description of the the hardware RAID controller here:

http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad4sr5hpmus.asp
 
The Anandtech review was awesome - I may have grasped 20% of it ;)

As is usual - there are trade offs between HDDs and now SSDs - no perfect solution. More thinking needed......
 
I read the aricle differently, I think

I believe he did conclude that despite performance degradation, the SSDs still outperformed the HDDs (with the exception of random writes, not including the X25-E). But as for access time, the SSDs were never beaten by the HDDs. Note also that there was only one reference to the X25-E and that was only because it was included in benchmarks. It has been known for a while that MLC SSDs have significant limitations; which is why I'm never impressed by MLC sequential speeds (particularly as regards reads). My X25-E definitely performs best under a load and genuinely gets faster everyday (it seems). I use the 4 disk array to throw data around (and, man, do I love my 1Tb Caviar Black at home), but I'll take my 32GB X25-E everyday of the week for multitasking. I don't know, to me it seems like the choice, at least as regards the X25-E, is speed v. capacity.
 
I concur - it is just like prosumer HD camcorders - different pros and cons vs your priority needs "most of the time" and cost and...............:eek:
 
emt1 said:
SHH!!! I don't want to her about that!!! I need to internally rationalize my decision. :D

Actually I really don't think it will be an issue for me. I am limited to SATA 1.5 speeds on my early 2008 MBP and I'm just a student. 32GB will be plenty. I'm only using 15GB as it is and I have everything on my MBP.
Click to expand...

15 GB?! :eek: Do you even use your MBP?! :p
 
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