HD upgrades. WD Scorpio, OCZ Vertex SSD

[elfxmilhouse]

I recently upgraded my MB HD... twice.

My 2.4ghz Alum Macbook came with the Toshiba 250GB 5400rpm.
Then I upgraded to the 320GB 7200rpm WD Scorpio Black.
It was really fast, had lots of space but it was louder and vibrated more than the 5400rpm.

The Vertex SSD was faster in terms of boot up and program launches but the thing i noticed most coming from the scorpio was the lack of noise and vibration. I got the 120GB version of this drive, a huge downgrade in space but I was only using about 70 gigs on my 320 gb drive.


boot up times:

Here is the WD Scorpio Black:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1OPpZM9-oI

Here is the OCZ Vertex:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-vU7-72D1U


Xbench:

Scorpio
Disk Test 70.22
Sequential 107.10
Uncached Write 127.97 78.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 128.60 72.76 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 73.64 21.55 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 122.26 61.45 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 52.23
Uncached Write 18.92 2.00 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 164.02 52.51 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 92.34 0.65 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 146.83 27.25 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Vertex

Disk Test 264.53
Sequential 246.21
Uncached Write 291.88 179.21 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 314.68 178.04 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 136.02 39.81 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 436.65 219.46 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 285.78
Uncached Write 97.58 10.33 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 474.77 151.99 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 2390.49 16.94 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 816.86 151.57 MB/sec [256K blocks]


fyi the vertex has firmware 1.10

 

[vendettabass]

cheers for that! Thinking about getting a Vertex after the next price drop

 

[MBHockey]

How long have you had the Vertex installed? Any crashes/freezes requiring hard reboot?

See the threads contained within in this one over at OCZ: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=55322

 

[nuckinfutz]

I'm not buying a laptop with a HDD

I don't have a laptop right now but if I did buy one it'd have a SSD in it.

Sure the fiscal conservative in us may cause a whince at SSD pricing per Gigabyte but the truth is the storage speed is the easiest spot to give your laptop a great speed upgrade.

It's funny I've seen people agonize over buying the 2.2GGz model versus the 2.4Ghz model of a computer. I don't thing they realize that the difference would be barely perceptible between the two computers.

Adding a SSD makes for a more significant difference in boot times, application launches and storage performance under load. And it's silent and doesn't vibrate.

In 5 years (or less) only the lowest end laptops will come with HDD drives. Western Digital just bought a SSD company for 65 million and Seagate is likely going to snap someone up once they get wind of how quickly their 2.5" HDD business is going to dwindle at the consumer level.

 

[elfxmilhouse]

How long have you had the Vertex installed? Any crashes/freezes requiring hard reboot?

See the threads contained within in this one over at OCZ: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=55322

Only had it for a couple days. but no problems so far. I spent A LOT of time on the ocz forums researching any possible issues with mac os. seems like some mbp models have problems but no hang ups so far with my mb.

also no sleep problems so far.

I don't have a laptop right now but if I did buy one it'd have a SSD in it.

Sure the fiscal conservative in us may cause a whince at SSD pricing per Gigabyte but the truth is the storage speed is the easiest spot to give your laptop a great speed upgrade.

It's funny I've seen people agonize over buying the 2.2GGz model versus the 2.4Ghz model of a computer. I don't thing they realize that the difference would be barely perceptible between the two computers.

Adding a SSD makes for a more significant difference in boot times, application launches and storage performance under load. And it's silent and doesn't vibrate.

In 5 years (or less) only the lowest end laptops will come with HDD drives. Western Digital just bought a SSD company for 65 million and Seagate is likely going to snap someone up once they get wind of how quickly their 2.5" HDD business is going to dwindle at the consumer level.

exactly. the HD changes the performance incredibly. even going from the 5400 to 7200 rpm drive i felt a significant speed boost. going from the 7200 to the ssd was even more amazing.

I think the cost is worth it. It has come down just enough for a lot of enthusiasts to experiment with the drives.

but the cost will eventually come down to standard HD prices in the future.

 

[nuckinfutz]

exactly. the HD changes the performance incredibly. even going from the 5400 to 7200 rpm drive i felt a significant speed boost. going from the 7200 to the ssd was even more amazing.

I think the cost is worth it. It has come down just enough for a lot of enthusiasts to experiment with the drives.

but the cost will eventually come down to standard HD prices in the future.

I'm looking at updating my Mac mini Core Duo 1.66 to a Core2 Duo 2Ghz and I'm going to upgrade to a Scorpio Black or Momentus 7200rpm drive. I need that better disc performance.

Future new Macs will have boot drives on SSD and I'll be moving large storage to say a 4-bay or larger NAS with these Green WD or Seagate 2TB drives.

Right now there are a lot of places to put your data. You can do the whole MobileMe thing or Dropbox which are great for small files and if Apple is smart they'll develop a multi bay storage device that lets you tap into your files at home and grab documents and even stream audio/video.

 

[pellets007]

Thanks! I was wondering the boot times of an OCZ drive. I'm looking into buying a 64/60GB one. On my previous laptop (Vista) I never used over 50GB in about 3 years length of time. On my MacBook, I have used 50GB with 8GB accounting for movies that I can put onto an external HDD. From what I hear, if you reinstall Leopard, you can cut down on disk space. Is that correct?

 

[elfxmilhouse]

on the topic of storage space:
i keep a lot of my stuff on my server. I have 1TB for music and movies and my time capsule does backups with 500GB. I also have dropbox and idisk so the lower disk space does not bother me for now.

Thanks! I was wondering the boot times of an OCZ drive. I'm looking into buying a 64/60GB one. On my previous laptop (Vista) I never used over 50GB in about 3 years length of time. On my MacBook, I have used 50GB with 8GB accounting for movies that I can put onto an external HDD. From what I hear, if you reinstall Leopard, you can cut down on disk space. Is that correct?

yea if you take out the languages you dont use and the printer driver it saves quite a bit.

 

[nuckinfutz]

Thanks! I was wondering the boot times of an OCZ drive. I'm looking into buying a 64/60GB one. On my previous laptop (Vista) I never used over 50GB in about 3 years length of time. On my MacBook, I have used 50GB with 8GB accounting for movies that I can put onto an external HDD. From what I hear, if you reinstall Leopard, you can cut down on disk space. Is that correct?

Easy stuff

Remove all uncessary printer drivers. My folder was 3 Gigs of crap I didn't need.

Get the free Monolingual http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/ and remove all language files that you have no need for.

If you're more daring and have an Intel Mac remove the PPC code as well.

Slightly more risky

Find a terminal command that will remove the useless designable.nib files left over from Xcode. You may have over a Gigabyte of these.

Get Xslimmer and remove the PPC code from each of your apps.


All in all we are all maintaining OS X installs that are likely 2x as large as they need to be. From now on going forward I'm looking at keeping my boot drive as trim as possible and pushing larger storage to external devices. Apple's working to trim Snow Leopard down as well so I believe it'll be even easier to shrink the OS footprint down meaning if we all do move to SSD we won't necessarily have to purchase the hugest one.