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Installing a 220MB/s read SSD in early 2008 macbook pro, possible and smart?

joopdor

joopdor

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 24, 2008
10
0
I'm having a luxury problem. You know how these things go... you think about a new product, and you start comparing specs... before you know it, you find the best performing product (also most expensive) and then you realize you will only be happy when you actually have found something comparable for a decent price... This happened to me again this week.

I am in South Korea for the moment and I figured I might as well buy a Samsung SSD hard drive for my macbookpro 4.1

While looking around, I found a clear destinction between:
  • MMDOE28G5MPP -> 70 Mb/s read and 90 Mb/s write and
  • MMCRE28G5MXP -> 220 Mb/s read and 200 Mb/s write

With about a $150 price difference.

The specs of the newer drive are as follows:
---------------------------------------------------------
Manufacturer SAMSUNG
Model 128GB MLC SSD 2.5 MMCRE28G5MXP
Interface SATA 3.0Gb/s

Performance
Host Transfer Rate 300MB/sec
Maximum Sequential Read Rate 220MB/s
Maximum Sequential Write Rate 200MB/s

---------------------------------------------------------

So this new drive is clearly more awesome then the common drive in terms of specs. But, - are there any things that I didn't consider in my quest?

1. I have a 1.5 Gigabit ICH8-M AHCI Sata controller, which theoretically should support the maximum speeds of this disk, am I right?

2. Can I expect any compatibility problems with this disk?
 
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The drive should work in your computer, at least it sounds that way as far as the connector is concerned. You shouldn't experience any comparability issues with it. As far as you computer is concerned it should function like a standard magnetic drive. I hope this helps.
 
@kornyboy Thank you for your answer
@JFreak Thank you, I do realize that! I currently have the FUJITSU MHY2200BH, which is incredibly slow. My macbook pro is faster then my old G4 powerbook, but not quite the leap that I expected when I bought it. I believe it's worth the trouble to upgrade!
 
joopdor said:
I'm having a luxury problem. You know how these things go... you think about a new product, and you start comparing specs... before you know it, you find the best performing product (also most expensive) and then you realize you will only be happy when you actually have found something comparable for a decent price... This happened to me again this week.

I am in South Korea for the moment and I figured I might as well buy a Samsung SSD hard drive for my macbookpro 4.1

While looking around, I found a clear destinction between:
  • MMDOE28G5MPP -> 70 Mb/s read and 90 Mb/s write and
  • MMCRE28G5MXP -> 220 Mb/s read and 200 Mb/s write

With about a $150 price difference.

The specs of the newer drive are as follows:
---------------------------------------------------------
Manufacturer SAMSUNG
Model 128GB MLC SSD 2.5 MMCRE28G5MXP
Interface SATA 3.0Gb/s

Performance
Host Transfer Rate 300MB/sec
Maximum Sequential Read Rate 220MB/s
Maximum Sequential Write Rate 200MB/s

---------------------------------------------------------

So this new drive is clearly more awesome then the common drive in terms of specs. But, - are there any things that I didn't consider in my quest?

1. I have a 1.5 Gigabit ICH8-M AHCI Sata controller, which theoretically should support the maximum speeds of this disk, am I right?

2. Can I expect any compatibility problems with this disk?
Click to expand...


This will likely work just fine but you will not be able to reach the full speed that the SSD can achieve under certain sequential workloads. SATA @ 1.5 Gb/s will max out at about 150MB/s. So, the answer to your question #1 is "no".

For question #2, your mileage may vary. I recently put a new Super Talent 256GB Ultradrive (STT_FTM56GX25H )in my MacBookPro4,1 and it works great except for occasionally my wake from sleep doesn't work. It may be a firmware issue, I'm not sure yet.

Even though you wont be able to max out the speed for sequential reads and writes, you will still likely experience a noticeable increase in performance. My SSD maxes out at about 130MB/s when it is running at 1.5Gb/s instead of the 3.0Gb/s that I would get in a new MBP with SATA running at full speed.

Personally, I think most people focus too much on the synthetic maximum throughput speeds of disk drives. Unless all I do all day long is copy really large files from one drive to another, the fact that the drive can sustain 220MB/s for sequential-only IO is not that important to me. On a laptop, you really care about random read IOPS and random write IOPS which the better SSDs can do much better than the stock drive you are replacing.


Have fun!

Subaqua
 
@subaqua Thank you for your response. I didn't realize that this particular drive would be out of the maximum capacity. I have been reading up about MLC, SLC, IOPS etc, and I noticed that OCZ, Super Talent and Intel drives are more popular then Samsung's. One worry is that the Super Talent seems to have no cache, do you have trouble with beachballs or hickups in OSX?
 
I have a MMCRE28G5MXP installed in my Macbook unibody two weeks ago, and i can say its a incredible hard drive. If anybody is interested, i can send a Xbench benchmark comparing the old samsung i had, and this new one
 
about MMCRE28G5MXP

Hello *******,
I am interested in your XBench-Score. Could you send it to me?
Thanks a lot,
prema
 
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