Hard Drive Usage

[Thiol]

Hi all. I'm trying to decide if a SSD is a good idea for the way I use my computer. I'm a scientist mostly using CS3 and Office for data analysis and presentations. Does anyone happen to know of an application that will measure how much reading from or writing to my hard drive over time? Thanks!

 

[super_kev]

Activity Monitor (in your Utilities folder) can do that, as well as iStat menus/iStat Pro (found here). I take it you're trying to figure out if you want a SSD or regular HD in your Macbook Air?

Check out this BareFeats article that does a shootout between the SSD and regular HD.

 

[Thiol]

Activity Monitor (in your Utilities folder) can do that, as well as iStat menus/iStat Pro (found here). I take it you're trying to figure out if you want a SSD or regular HD in your Macbook Air?

Check out this BareFeats article that does a shootout between the SSD and regular HD.

Thanks! Activity monitor does have a sum total for "data read" and "data written" under disk activity. iStat menus only shows the amount of activity in an instant, not a sum.

I've actually been toying with the idea of getting an SSD as my Mac Pro boot disk. If I was doing mostly writing, I would be worried that any benefits from the SSD read speeds would be offset... Not sure yet...

 

[super_kev]

In my opinion, a SSD for your Mac Pro would be a waste of money. If all you want is faster boot & application launch times, than check out iDefrag and optimize your drive. While OS X is said to have automatic defragmentation, it is limited, and your drive will get fragmented over time as you use/remove programs and install software updates. I just used iDefrag on my laptop and it starts up much faster, without all the hard drive seeking it had before. Just make sure to back up first.