G. Skill 256GB Titan SSD in my MacBook Pro... Thoughts, Benchmarks, Pics, & Ramblings

[dgdosen]

First off, I admin I'm not an expert.

See this link here to verify the numbers I used and to understand in greater detail how an SSD works:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=2

Yep - I read that and I agree, MLC needs to erase and write and it's not the best. I could care less what happens on the inside of the drive, as long as the drive works well as a unit. I want to see benchmarks of some "steady state" performance loss. I've seen none and can't find them anywhere. I don't care how slow the components are, if as a whole, they perform as advertised on day one and day 365.

See this link for details of the JMicron stuttering issue when it was first discovered:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=7

I read that article too - the problem is, it's over 150 days old! It only references the old "single controller" SSDs. I agree those devices and their single JMicron controller are craptacular. Luckily, we were all smart enough not to spend twice as much money for half the performance a half a year ago. That's not the issue here.

Finally see this thread here for evidence of the stuttering and for verification of my explanation on ssd performance degradation as it pertains to the titan drive in particular:

http://forums.anandtech.com/message...ORDFRM=&STARTPAGE=1&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear

I also read this entire forum post. There are no benchmarks, just an isolated occurrence or two of users having issues on Windows Vista (not Mac OSX). For every complaint (I saw two) there were five users who were ecstatic. Of the two with complaints, one said it was working great after tweaks and "settling down" and the other will return his with an RMA.

Again, it doesn't matter what you or I think - let the numbers speak for themselves. Let's look at someone's posted benchmarks, and see if there is a stuttering and/or steady state problem.

Anandtech will post a review of some of these newer drives this month. Let's see what they say.

 

[bugout]

I'm coming up on a week of heavy read and write use in and out of VM's and have not encountered a single stutter.

 

[tubbymac]

Good point on reads being the primary indication of snappy performance. Since I explained reads don't suffer from performance degradation, if your usage is mostly reads the read performance should stay close to constant over time.

Also good point on the MLC being not the best but an economical trade off over the much more expensive SLC technology.

As to the links they were pretty long. It wasn't until around the middle of the thread I linked before other people talked about stutters. As louden pointed out it seems to be Windows users and for every person who says they have a stutter/freeze problem you get many more saying they don't have any stuttering at all on the Titan drive.

The drive is still new so that's why a lot of the big sites still haven't done reviews yet. Most people just got the drive at the start of the month. But like I explained, you don't need to wait for a benchmark to know the performance degradation. I calculated the lower bound. Due to the way MLC works you can't write faster than a factor of 3.28 compared to the time it took to write a cell the first time. No benchmark can sneak around this because that's the lower limit on how fast a read, erase, and write operation can occur given the numbers from the Anandtech article. But again this is only write performance - and for most users the read performance is what matters more like spaceball stated.

 

[CTechKid]

On a side note, Anandtech has slated a full SSD review and breakdown for February. Lets hope they stick to their schedule!

 

[g808]

I don't know, or care, so much about numbers. What I do know is that I now have the 256GB SSD in my new 2.4GHz MacBook and it flies! Everything is definitely way snappier. WinXP VM shows a remarkable improvement. Now I need my 4GB of RAM from MacSales to arrive.

 

[tubbymac]

Well here's a bit of a surprise. If you go to the G.Skill manufacturer web site and then click on the link to their official english support forums, you'll find a post where a customer asks straight up whether the drives and the stuttering have improved over the last 6 months.

The OFFICIAL response by G.Skill (coming straight from the manufacturer just this 5th of February, so it includes the Titan drive) is this bit of broken english:

"MLC SSD stuttering problem is still there but it gets improves."

Kudos to a manufacturer to being honest for once.

 

[dgdosen]

Got mine today...

I'm duping the disk with SuperDuper and Winclone (for the bootcamp partition).

I've already got the Windows 7 partition cloned, and am creating the SuperDuper copy right now, while I've got the disk connected via Firewire...

Almost there...

 

[spaceballl]

So I just re-read this thread from start to finish. I think the neat thing here, and the thing that really gets me going, is how new and fresh and fun this technology is. It seems like there is so much "unknown" out there now and so many different options. In a year or two all these things will be worked out, these drives will be lightning, and power consumption will be way down. I'm still loving my G. Skill Titan right now, but I'm REALLY excited about the drive that goes in my next macbook!

 

[dgdosen]

I'm excited too -

The way I look at it - this is the biggest, slowest, highest power consuming, highest price drive you'll ever buy again.

Here's my Xbench disk results - again - not so awe inspiring as far as XBench results, but pretty good as far as reading and writing (especially reading).


Results 57.05
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.6 (9G55)
Physical RAM 3072 MB
Model MacBookPro2,2
Drive Type G.SKILL TITAN 256GB SSD
Disk Test 57.05
Sequential 72.00
Uncached Write 43.01 26.40 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 191.19 108.18 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 47.39 13.87 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 167.58 84.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 47.23
Uncached Write 14.45 1.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 76.58 24.51 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1980.80 14.04 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 523.91 97.22 MB/sec [256K blocks]


All this makes for a pretty fast machine. It's hard to believe how fast it feels.

 

[ShortArc]

How are you guys doing with regards to power consumption?
My TITAN seems to drain the battery faster than my previous HD (500GB Samsung).
This is a subjective remark as I did not do any real testing.

 

[dgdosen]

Great speed, but - there are some issues:

So, I've had this in for a day, and here's some thoughts. FYI - I'm running the late 2006 C2D Merom and this wasn't a fresh install, but was a Superduper and Winclone copy from the old hard drive. One other point - I initially formated the drive while it was in an external firewire adapter.

- My Winclone of my Windows7 bootcamp partition didn't make it. I had upgraded from Vista on the previous drive, and it was working, but it's not supported and wouldn't boot. I haven't been using Windows that much, but do need to for development, and am OK with opting out of bootcamp and using fusion. This wasn't a big deal.

- Heat and running fans. My fans are on quite a bit. They're on while running Fusion (which always was the case) but now they seem to be on much more when the laptop is idling. I'll have more opinion on this later....

- Sleep - Help! I'm a victim of the sleep mode issue. Whenever the laptop goes into sleep, it won't come out unless I do a hard reboot. It worked once for me by selecting "sleep" from the Apple menu, but every other time it needed a hard reboot. One interesting thing - when I do that hard reboot, it looks like it reboots twice - once with just the gong, and then again a couple of seconds later... Very odd.

- Mounting iso images in fusion with Windows 7 (I know - obscure): More beta issues (i think) but when I mounted a couple of ISO images in Windows 7 to install software, the installs would fail because it was failing reading the drives. This might be a x64 vs x86 or iso software issue. I'll look into this a bit further, but this isn't as clean as I'd like, as I did all this on my mac pro without any issues...

Thoughts, advice?

So, what do you think, do I have a lemon? I'd post this to g.skills support forums, but it doesn't look like they have issues with OS X.

 

[spaceballl]

I'm not noticing the fans. My computer seems to be about the same, when it comes to heat and fan usage. However, I've noticed that battery life seems to be a bit worse, which is unfortunate. I need to play with it more before I have a really strong opinion on it. I was hoping to either have better battery life... or the same... I've been doing a lot of mozy backups recently, though, so maybe i'm just really hitting the wifi hard... too early to tell.

 

[ShortArc]

louden,
I have not been able to resolve my sleep issue. I turn sleep off and just close the lid to put the computer to sleep. That works fine.

 

[spaceballl]

I've been thinking... do you both have unibody macbooks? I think you do... therefore, we're using different SATA controllers. Maybe that has something to do w/ it?

 

[ShortArc]

I've been thinking... do you both have unibody macbooks? I think you do... therefore, we're using different SATA controllers. Maybe that has something to do w/ it?

Spaceballl,
Yes Unibody. Something else interesting. Sleep mode under Bootcamp XP Pro SP2 seems to work fine. Go figure.

 

[TexasAg]

spaceball, I hooked up the titan ssd to the macbook pro, but the system isn't seeing the drive. If I try to boot up using the install disc, the disk utility app doesn't even see a drive attached. Did you have any issues actually plugging the drive into the sata connector inside the macbook case?

 

[spaceballl]

spaceball, I hooked up the titan ssd to the macbook pro, but the system isn't seeing the drive. If I try to boot up using the install disc, the disk utility app doesn't even see a drive attached. Did you have any issues actually plugging the drive into the sata connector inside the macbook case?

Nope. What kind of macbook do you have? You may not have slid the drive into place properly. also, did you make sure to remove the drive tray from the previous drive to attach it to the new one?

 

[Niiro13]

spaceball, I hooked up the titan ssd to the macbook pro, but the system isn't seeing the drive. If I try to boot up using the install disc, the disk utility app doesn't even see a drive attached. Did you have any issues actually plugging the drive into the sata connector inside the macbook case?

Nope. What kind of macbook do you have? You may not have slid the drive into place properly. also, did you make sure to remove the drive tray from the previous drive to attach it to the new one?

I actually did. What I had to do was use my HDD enclosure (well, more like a disassembled WD Passport) and connect it externally (USB for me, though firewire is faster). I didn't see it as a drive to install Leopard onto, but I checked out Disk Utility and noticed it wasn't partitioned, so I partitioned it, and it worked .

 

[spaceballl]

Yup you need to do that. I thought you were saying it wasn't showing up in disk utility. Oh well glad it's working!

 

[TexasAg]

Yup you need to do that. I thought you were saying it wasn't showing up in disk utility. Oh well glad it's working!

I partitioned mine on another computer, and it still isn't showing up. Weird that the macbook works with the standard drive and the ssd drive can be partitioned on another computer. but the macbook can't see or use the ssd.

 

[dgdosen]

A bit more follow up -
I don't have a unibody, I have a 2006 Merom C2D.

I was having issues with the disk verification failing. I was able to repair by booting with the setup disk, but I figured I had the backup and superduper clone, so I tried a fresh install of OS X to see if I could get sleep and bootcamp to work.

That didn't work our so well
- I keep getting disk verification errors - so that I need to reboot with the setup disk to repair.
- I'm now unable to load several apps. I just get an error as they start up, and a note to ignore, send feedback to Apple, or relaunch.
- Sleep still doesn't work in just about any case.

I think I may have a lemon. I'll conctct g.skill tomorrow to see if that have any advice, but I think I may need to replace this drive from newegg.

I hope I'm having an isolated occurrence

 

[spaceballl]

I partitioned mine on another computer, and it still isn't showing up. Weird that the macbook works with the standard drive and the ssd drive can be partitioned on another computer. but the macbook can't see or use the ssd.

What do you mean it can't "see" the SSD. Do you mean the partition isn't properly mounting? Or do you mean that it is not listed on the left-hand column in disk manager?

A bit more follow up -
I don't have a unibody, I have a 2006 Merom C2D.
I was having issues with the disk verification failing. I was able to repair by booting with the setup disk, but I figured I had the backup and superduper clone, so I tried a fresh install of OS X to see if I could get sleep and bootcamp to work.

That didn't work our so well
- I keep getting disk verification errors - so that I need to reboot with the setup disk to repair.
- I'm now unable to load several apps. I just get an error as they start up, and a note to ignore, send feedback to Apple, or relaunch.
- Sleep still doesn't work in just about any case.

I think I may have a lemon. I'll conctct g.skill tomorrow to see if that have any advice, but I think I may need to replace this drive from newegg.

I hope I'm having an isolated occurrence

What are these disk verification errors you speak of? Why did you not recover from the image using disk utility? You could have had some permissions errors w/ Time Machine restore. I've had that before. May not be related to the SSD, but rather a botched restore process. I mean could be the SSD too, I suppose. Let me know!

 

[TexasAg]

What do you mean it can't "see" the SSD. Do you mean the partition isn't properly mounting? Or do you mean that it is not listed on the left-hand column in disk manager?

When I plug the ssd drive directly into the sata connector where the old drive used to be, the os x install cd will start the install process. When it gets to the point when you need to select where to install os x, it cannot find the ssd drive, even if the drive has been partitioned. If you select the disk utility application in the menu, it also cannot see the ssd drive. The only drive listed is the optical drive.

I found the answer on the apple support website. Apparently you cannot install os x on an ssd drive connected directly to the sata connector. If you put the ssd drive in an enclosure and hook it up to the macbook using a usb cable, the macbook can see it, and you can install os x on the ssd drive. Once os x is installed, you can hook the ssd drive to the sata connector and everything works fine. It will work from that point on.

 

[Y2JDMBFAN]

When I plug the ssd drive directly into the sata connector where the old drive used to be, the os x install cd will start the install process. When it gets to the point when you need to select where to install os x, it cannot find the ssd drive, even if the drive has been partitioned. If you select the disk utility application in the menu, it also cannot see the ssd drive. The only drive listed is the optical drive.

I found the answer on the apple support website. Apparently you cannot install os x on an ssd drive connected directly to the sata connector. If you put the ssd drive in an enclosure and hook it up to the macbook using a usb cable, the macbook can see it, and you can install os x on the ssd drive. Once os x is installed, you can hook the ssd drive to the sata connector and everything works fine. It will work from that point on.

This is totally untrue if you have a unibody Macbook Pro...I have my Gskill hooked directly to the SATA connector and it works fine.

 

[pprior]

...I found the answer on the apple support website. Apparently you cannot install os x on an ssd drive connected directly to the sata connector. If you put the ssd drive in an enclosure and hook it up to the macbook using a usb cable, the macbook can see it, and you can install os x on the ssd drive. Once os x is installed, you can hook the ssd drive to the sata connector and everything works fine. It will work from that point on.

!! Can you link that document?

I don't understand why you couldn't install ox x directly to an SSD - it's just another hard drive to the system, right?

Is this just in mac laptops (I will be installing into mac pro tonight) or is it an leopard issue?