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Intel Solid State Drives

R

RainCityMacFan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 10, 2007
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I am SO CLOSE to pulling the trigger on an SSD right now and I need one more help recommendations wise.

I'm looking at mainly an Intel drive for my 2011 15" MBP. I know SF-based drives are faster but it seems like there are so much issues plagued with them and they are very costly as well. So I am only looking towards Intel drives for their reliability and price point.

And so I have a few questions...

Is the 320 issue free when it comes to the MBP?
Can anyone weight in on the comparison between the 320 and the 510 or other drives? Provided that you own them and real world difference that is.
And is TRIM necessary with this drive?
 
KJmoon117 said:
I am SO CLOSE to pulling the trigger on an SSD right now and I need one more help recommendations wise.

I'm looking at mainly an Intel drive for my 2011 15" MBP. I know SF-based drives are faster but it seems like there are so much issues plagued with them and they are very costly as well. So I am only looking towards Intel drives for their reliability and price point.

And so I have a few questions...

Is the 320 issue free when it comes to the MBP?
Can anyone weight in on the comparison between the 320 and the 510 or other drives? Provided that you own them and real world difference that is.
And is TRIM necessary with this drive?
Click to expand...

Glad you asked this, something I would really like to know. Sorry I cant be helpful...
 
if i understand right, 510 is sata 3, and 320 is sata 2, and since you have a 2011 mbp, youd want to go for the 510. both are very reliable drives and come with a 5 year warranty.

my question is, with lion coming out soon, im wondering if certain drives will perform better with the new OS than others.

any thoughts?
 
I have heard that there are often compatibility issues between the macbook pro sata III chip and many sata III ssds. Since it sounds like you are looking for a plug and play solution, I would verify that you will not have any compatibility issues with whatever sata III intel ssd you choose.
 
adrian1480 said:
Intel: 2nd place speed, but 1st place reliability.

Go Intel and don't look back.
Click to expand...

Remember these are with windows pc's, have to consider what happens on a mac, there have been problems, but i think they are sorted.
 
JR1993 said:
Remember these are with windows pc's, have to consider what happens on a mac, there have been problems, but i think they are sorted.
Click to expand...

Since Intel SSDs can have their firmware updated on macs whereas OCZ cannot (they require linux boot disc) thats one more reason to get the Intel SSD (it also uses 1/3 of the power when idle compared to OCZ, not bad!)
 
wikus said:
Since Intel SSDs can have their firmware updated on macs whereas OCZ cannot (they require linux boot disc) thats one more reason to get the Intel SSD (it also uses 1/3 of the power when idle compared to OCZ, not bad!)
Click to expand...

Yeah I know, I will be buying this drive (80% sure ATM), im just saying that there have been problems. AFAIK, the problems are 17" models from before april though
 
i have a 120gb 320 intel in my MBP 2011. It has been about 3 weeks, best upgrade i have done so far. I don't do benchmarks etc, just go on real world what i notice and its night and day, very pleased
 
audiofx said:
i have a 120gb 320 intel in my MBP 2011. It has been about 3 weeks, best upgrade i have done so far. I don't do benchmarks etc, just go on real world what i notice and its night and day, very pleased
Click to expand...

why did you choose this over the 510?
 
JR1993 said:
Yeah I know, I will be buying this drive (80% sure ATM), im just saying that there have been problems. AFAIK, the problems are 17" models from before april though
Click to expand...

I'm in the same boat, its either the Intel 510 120gb or the OCZ Vertex 3 120gb. The OCZ is blazing fast, and especially faster with write speeds. I've heard that Apple plans on having TRIM support in OS X Lion for OCZ SSD drives, so I'm going to wait until its final release (or even 10.7.1 or 10.7.2).

The 3% failure rate of the OCZs is whats holding me back.
 
wikus said:
I'm in the same boat, its either the Intel 510 120gb or the OCZ Vertex 3 120gb. The OCZ is blazing fast, and especially faster with write speeds. I've heard that Apple plans on having TRIM support in OS X Lion for OCZ SSD drives, so I'm going to wait until its final release (or even 10.7.1 or 10.7.2).

The 3% failure rate of the OCZs is whats holding me back.
Click to expand...

Apple do work with intel processors, so i would imagine they would give trim support to intel before most other manufacturers. Also, would you notice the write speed difference. You might do, all i write is a word document or a small file usually.
 
JR1993 said:
Apple do work with intel processors, so i would imagine they would give trim support to intel before most other manufacturers. Also, would you notice the write speed difference. You might do, all i write is a word document or a small file usually.
Click to expand...

I try to write as little files as possible to my boot drive to keep it clean. Most of the stuff that gets written to is my secondary storage drive, so write speeds won't be much of an issue.

However, there are those odd times where I use the desktop folder as a temporary place to write some files, like doing a test rendering of a large movie file (only because i dont have to go through the finder to find it).

Theres still time for OSX Lion to be released, TRIM support could be there for all drives (and it damn well better).
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

The new MBP actually support 16gb of RAM. But at quite a cost.
Oops wrong thread.
 
DarwinOSX said:
Alot of people are having issues with the 510. Do a Mroogle search.
Click to expand...

Will do, but I think the problem is isolated with the 17" having problems with the SATA 6 bay and if not, I think the EFI firmware fixed it because the complaints are pretty much gone from these forums.
 
Last edited:
DarwinOSX said:
Alot of people are having issues with the 510. Do a Mroogle search.
Click to expand...

Those posts seemed to stop after the MBP EFI update. I think that fixed a lot is SSD problems for all SSD brands.

You can search the forums for problems with any brand and you will see posts from users having troubles.
 
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