mSATA in DLSD-Preliminary Results

[bunnspecial]

A few months back, I bought a really neat IDE-mSATA converter on Ebay that, when assembled, has the same form factor as standard 2.5" drive. I ordered a couple, with an eye toward future projects, but drug my feet on ordering mSATA drives.

Finally, I found some new Toshiba-branded 128gb on Ebay last week for what I thought was a reasonable price.

I sat down this evening, and proceeded to install one in my DLSD.

I had some "teething pains" that are probably not worth going into, but the adapter I bought didn't like any of the USB-IDE bridges I had on hand so I couldn't clone my current install onto the new drive as I normally would.

In any case, I went ahead and installed it the mSATA drive, and split it into two partitions so that I could dual boot Leopard and Tiger(Leopard for general use, Tiger for classic support).

Somewhere in the process, I managed to fry the PCB on my old hard drive(due to a bad external PSU that also fried), so I'm awaiting a replacement from Ebay so that I can clone it and hopefully transplant that good 7200 RPM drive into my TiBook. Again, that slowed me down.

In any case, I ran the restore disks and then did a quick Xbench. The results are below. The 92 mb/s uncached read is particularly impressive, considering that this is close to the theoretical 100mb/s bus limit. What's also impressive(at least to me) is that this on the Tiger partition, which is 20gb at the end of the drive. As I understand it, SSD performance tends to degrade in this situation. When I get my old Leopard install cloned(or give up and just do a fresh Leopard install) I'll repeat.

Pressing the power button from a cold shut-down to getting a functional desktop is about 20 seconds, which is also a really nice change. The system overall feels a lot more responsive-I would, of course, expect nothing less, but it's still nice to see "in the real world."

 

[bunnspecial]

And, here are the results from the now-empty partition at the front of the drive that will eventually hold Leopard

 

[val1984]

I had some "teething pains" that are probably not worth going into, but the adapter I bought didn't like any of the USB-IDE bridges I had on hand so I couldn't clone my current install onto the new drive as I normally would.

In any case, I went ahead and installed it the mSATA drive, and split it into two partitions so that I could dual boot Leopard and Tiger(Leopard for general use, Tiger for general support).

I had the same problem with mine, at first I thought it didn't work but I went ahead and installed it in my PowerBook G4 and it did work

In any case, I ran the restore disks and then did a quick Xbench. The results are below. The 92 mb/s uncached read is particularly impressive, considering that this is close to the theoretical 100mb/s bus limit. What's also impressive(at least to me) is that this on the Tiger partition, which is 20gb at the end of the drive. As I understand it, SSD performance tends to degrade in this situation. When I get my old Leopard install cloned(or give up and just do a fresh Leopard install) I'll repeat.

Pressing the power button from a cold shut-down to getting a functional desktop is about 20 seconds, which is also a really nice change. The system overall feels a lot more responsive-I would, of course, expect nothing less, but it's still nice to see "in the real world."

Your results are consistent with mine (with a Crucial M500 128GB mSATA SSD).
(You can find them here, in a block of french text )

 

[harrymatic]

This is really interesting - certainly beats hunting around for increasingly difficult to find large capacity 7200rpm IDE drives. I've got a 12" PowerBook that would really benefit from some fast storage as the stock drive is awfully slow.

 

[bunnspecial]

This is really interesting - certainly beats hunting around for increasingly difficult to find large capacity 7200rpm IDE drives. I've got a 12" PowerBook that would really benefit from some fast storage as the stock drive is awfully slow.

You don't appreciate how much of a difference an SSD(or even a good platter drive) makes in these computers until you've taken the time to try it.

The difference isn't as dramatic in the DLSD as in some other computers, since I was coming from a 7200rpm drive.

I do have a 1.5ghz 12" PB with an mSATA drive. Comparing it to my recently acquired-but nearly identically speced-12" PB from the recent $46 mass Ebay buy several of us took part in, the difference is quite noticeable.

7200 RPM laptop drives are power hogs and also noisy. The one I took out of this computer actually couldn't spin up using the power from a single USB cable(every other laptop HDD I've used can). That was why I was using the external power supply, which unfortunately cooked itself and the drive along with it. Hopefully a PCB swap will fix it.

 

[MagicBoy]

In any case, I ran the restore disks and then did a quick Xbench. The results are below. The 92 mb/s uncached read is particularly impressive, considering that this is close to the theoretical 100mb/s bus limit. What's also impressive(at least to me) is that this on the Tiger partition, which is 20gb at the end of the drive. As I understand it, SSD performance tends to degrade in this situation. When I get my old Leopard install cloned(or give up and just do a fresh Leopard install) I'll repeat.

Partitions at the end of a drive will be slower on a traditional spinning rust drive - for the same rpm less sectors pass under the heads the closer you get to the centre of the platter.

SSDs are unaffected by this. The "sectors" as presented to the OS bear no similarity to the physical memory address. Two what appear to be contiguous blocks can be on two completely different flash chips, due to the wear levelling algorithms in the drive firmware.