Need another SSD drive

[chupacabra31]

I am going to install another SSD for my late 2010 macbook pro. I have on order a nimitz hdd caddy to replace the spot where the super drive was.

So just wondering what is the best bang (cheaper is better, but not at the cost of reliability or ease of installation) for the buck drive right now that is a little over 150GB? I want to use it purely as a scratch disk for photoshop.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

 

[chupacabra31]

No one has a suggestion?

 

[r0k]

I am going to install another SSD for my late 2010 macbook pro. I have on order a nimitz hdd caddy to replace the spot where the super drive was.

So just wondering what is the best bang (cheaper is better, but not at the cost of reliability or ease of installation) for the buck drive right now that is a little over 150GB? I want to use it purely as a scratch disk for photoshop.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

No one has a suggestion?

Not really. I think you can pick up 120 GB SSD for around $200 but if you really need 150 GB you are probably looking at 240 GB to 256 GB SSD which will run you over $400.

I'm happy with OCZ vertex 2 in my older machines which has transfer rate 3 GB/S. On a newer machine you will want the newer SATA 3 6 GB/S controllers. I don't know the specs for the late 2010 MBP but you might do just fine with the older and less expensive SATA 2 based drives while you can still get them. They are rapidly going out of stock.

 

[dljeffery]

You can get the Intel 320 Series SSD in a 160GB capacity. Cost should be somewhere in the $290-ish range. This is a SATA2 drive, which is all the 2010 MBP supports anyway.

I have had one of these in my mid 2010 15" MBP for the past 4 months and love it. I decided on it due to Intel's strong reliability record, rather than going after my first inclination, which was to base my decision on performance benchmarks. That said, the 320 series is no slouch! I have it installed in place of my SuperDrive and have had zero issues with it. I left my hard drive installed for storage of iTunes U videos and a Snow Leopard backup (I was running the Lion previews and needed to use SL on occasion), but very rarely touch anything on it.

 

[chupacabra31]

You can get the Intel 320 Series SSD in a 160GB capacity. Cost should be somewhere in the $290-ish range. This is a SATA2 drive, which is all the 2010 MBP supports anyway.

I have had one of these in my mid 2010 15" MBP for the past 4 months and love it. I decided on it due to Intel's strong reliability record, rather than going after my first inclination, which was to base my decision on performance benchmarks. That said, the 320 series is no slouch! I have it installed in place of my SuperDrive and have had zero issues with it. I left my hard drive installed for storage of iTunes U videos and a Snow Leopard backup (I was running the Lion previews and needed to use SL on occasion), but very rarely touch anything on it.

Yeah I just found out the 320 series has a serious bug that intel is working on releasing a firmware fix soon. I really don't like that intel does not have any support for OSX. Also no trim support which kind of cheeses me off. I should have done better research before I bought the 128gb 320 series I have now. They apparently do not have any kind of OS independent garbage collection or trim support either (although I could be wrong).

I also found out that I may not need as large a drive as I thought for a photoshop CS5 scratch disk as I do not edit multiple photos at the same time. Max is maybe 1 20mb raw photo at a time.

So I guess 60gb would be good. I am thinking about the OCZ vertex 2 or agility 2 as they have software independent garbage collection or trim support and they seem to have fixed some reliability issues.

 

[dljeffery]

Yeah I just found out the 320 series has a serious bug that intel is working on releasing a firmware fix soon. I really don't like that intel does not have any support for OSX. Also no trim support which kind of cheeses me off. I should have done better research before I bought the 128gb 320 series I have now. They apparently do not have any kind of OS independent garbage collection or trim support either (although I could be wrong).

I also found out that I may not need as large a drive as I thought for a photoshop CS5 scratch disk as I do not edit multiple photos at the same time. Max is maybe 1 20mb raw photo at a time.

So I guess 60gb would be good. I am thinking about the OCZ vertex 2 or agility 2 as they have software independent garbage collection or trim support and they seem to have fixed some reliability issues.

I haven't experienced any issues at all with mine. Also, the TRIM support is something you'll have to fault Apple for, not Intel. That applies to all third party SSDs across the board. But you can use the free third party TRIM Enabler to fix it. Worked on SL, works on Lion.

If you are concerned about bugs, have you actually researched the OCZ drives? They benchmark incredibly well, but there have been way too many reports of suddenly bricked drives for my taste, and that went on for the entire year that I was researching before finally taking the plunge (and the problems started well before that entire year period, too).

What is the Intel bug you're referring to? Not that I'm worried, but I suppose it would be good to know. Have you experienced it on your 320 series SSD?

 

[chupacabra31]

I haven't experienced any issues at all with mine. Also, the TRIM support is something you'll have to fault Apple for, not Intel. That applies to all third party SSDs across the board. But you can use the free third party TRIM Enabler to fix it. Worked on SL, works on Lion.

If you are concerned about bugs, have you actually researched the OCZ drives? They benchmark incredibly well, but there have been way too many reports of suddenly bricked drives for my taste, and that went on for the entire year that I was researching before finally taking the plunge (and the problems started well before that entire year period, too).

What is the Intel bug you're referring to? Not that I'm worried, but I suppose it would be good to know. Have you experienced it on your 320 series SSD?

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/21299

No fix yet that I can see.

I hear ya on the OCZ, but like I said they seem to have fixed that bug and they are considered very reliable now.

Also I hear ya on the trim support. I have downloaded that plug-in.

I just wish Intel was a little more apple friendly, it seems you have to jump through some hoops to update the firmware which seems kind of lame.

 

[treestar]

Samsung 470 Series

 

[dljeffery]

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/21299

No fix yet that I can see.

I hear ya on the OCZ, but like I said they seem to have fixed that bug and they are considered very reliable now.

Also I hear ya on the trim support. I have downloaded that plug-in.

I just wish Intel was a little more apple friendly, it seems you have to jump through some hoops to update the firmware which seems kind of lame.

Thanks for the link!

I've had to force my MBP to reboot a couple times on this SSD (some Lion preview issues, it seemed); no issues yet. Well, at least I have local weekly external backups, plus near constant Backblaze backups, plus hosted Subversion, if this ever *does* happen to me.

As far as the firmware updating issue, isn't this true across the board? I haven't seen native Mac firmware updaters for any SSDs, at any rate, including the OWC branded ones (which are the ones that really should have them, if any did). And, yeah, that does suck.