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non power user, SSD worth it?
- Thread starter brendu
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I was going to post this. 160GB for me is wayyyy too small. I would love to have an SSD but I rather have a 500gb 7200 RPM drive because of the simple fact that in today's software technology (photography/video) 7200RPMS is sufficient.
For a standalone PC, they do have even faster HD's (i.e. Raptor Drives) that are like 10,000RPM's
The point I'm making is, right now 160GB seems to be capped at what people can afford. Going 500GB SSD drive would be like an arm and a leg, and possibly an unborn child. There isn't really any current software technology out there that you can say will require an SSD. Of course SSD will benefit any software today but not necessary. Who cares if you can open Safari 2 seconds faster.
For me, I have several terabyte external drives (Drobo and the like) and even if I had an SSD, I would only be able to launch the application and work through the application a bit faster but it still needs to write files back and forth to my external drives.
It's like sprinting a few yards and then walk, sprint, walk. versus constantly pacing.
Now...if there were 500GB SSD or even a terabyte, now we're talking because then all my 10meg photographs I can actually keep on my MBP and everything will be sprinting!
Data storage is best done on a NAS or some sort of external storage 🙂 You rarely need more then like 140 GB storage while "on the go" 😉
Doesnt this void the warranty? If not it seems to make the most sense for me because i dont use the SD ever, and couldnt i share my imacs optical drive similarly to how the air does it? if switching the optical with a SSD it will void the warranty, i am not willing to do that, ive had too many macs with random problems...
It voids the warranty for the optical drive and anything that they could say you damaged from replacing it. But if one of the USB ports is not functioning correctly, then it's still under warranty unless they can somehow prove that you messed it up despite it being on the opposite side of the computer (still could happen easily). That's what AppleCare told me when I said I dented the display (they even said that as long as it's not under the dent, if I get a stuck pixel it's under warranty 😀). Most people switch out the optical drive with a hard drive and put the SSD in the hard drive bay.
If you get the optibay from their website, then they'll send a free enclosure so you can put your optical drive in there and use it via USB instead of sharing over the network. But yes, you can share the optical drive just like the Air (note that you can't install an application that installs outside OS X [like windows boot camp which reboots to install] or the like with it, but anything else is fine)
im sorry im not sure where you mean, whose website? i checked apples site and did not find anything when searching for "optibay" again sorry, im reading as many threads as i can to figure this stuff out on my own but its all pretty new to me. regarding the optical drive from another comp. I only use osx on my MBP so it not working under windows or bootcamp does not matter to me. thanks for the help
EDIT: i found their site, thanks... ill do some more research and post any more questions that i will inevitably have soon.
LoL, not when you're using your macbook pro as a desktop replacement. 140 gig is way too low even "on the go".
Even if it's not use as a desktop replacement, you know who that each photograph a photographer takes is 10+ Megs, times that to 500+ pictures, uhh..140 is blown.
Seems you skipped out math in 6th grade...
10 MB * 500 = 5 000 MB = 5 GB
So basically you could carry 10k pictures with you and still have like 40Gb left (and then you left like 15 GB for the OS and programs).
So you say you take over 10k pictures before you return to your desk where you can store them on an external, or before you get to a wifi spot and can sync em? Seems unlikely.
140gb would be plenty for me.
I have about 45gb outside my home directory. In my home directory I have 50gb of pictures and videos that make up essentially all the pictures I've ever taken. I have 4gb of music and video in itunes. The rest of the space, close to 160gb, is taken up by VMWare images and home video recordings I need to move to DVD. I've been lazy about the home videos, and I should just move them to an external. I need at least one of the VMWare images, but I have at least two copies of Windows XP, one of which could be moved to an external.
Basically I could get down to 100-120gb used if I tried, even though right now my 320gb drive is nearly full.
I have about 45gb outside my home directory. In my home directory I have 50gb of pictures and videos that make up essentially all the pictures I've ever taken. I have 4gb of music and video in itunes. The rest of the space, close to 160gb, is taken up by VMWare images and home video recordings I need to move to DVD. I've been lazy about the home videos, and I should just move them to an external. I need at least one of the VMWare images, but I have at least two copies of Windows XP, one of which could be moved to an external.
Basically I could get down to 100-120gb used if I tried, even though right now my 320gb drive is nearly full.
FieryFurnace
macrumors 6502
zw-gator
macrumors 6502a
I have a 500GB HD now (WD Blue) and couldn't imagine going back to anything smaller.
I had an 80GB and a 160GB HD in my past two laptops, and I'd always have to think about my HD capacity when DL'ing something (I also had a 500GB My Book).
I don't understand why someone would spend all that money on a MBP and then stick a 64GB SSD in it. Like, what are you doing on your computer that you NEED that kinda power in the first place, yet don't need ANY storage?
I had an 80GB and a 160GB HD in my past two laptops, and I'd always have to think about my HD capacity when DL'ing something (I also had a 500GB My Book).
I don't understand why someone would spend all that money on a MBP and then stick a 64GB SSD in it. Like, what are you doing on your computer that you NEED that kinda power in the first place, yet don't need ANY storage?
For your needs as you describe them, a 120/128GB SSD is worth every cent. You will never ever want to use a spinning, vibrating, noisy, hot, disaster-prone HDD again! If you can get one for a good price, the newest Intel 160GB would be the best, but if 120GB is enough, then there are a dozen or so great SSD's from a variety of manufacturers to choose from. All will make a huge difference to your computing experience. The other day I tried going back to a 160GB 7200rpm HDD (I normally use a 120/128GB OZC Summit SSD). It was not a nice reminder of what I didn't miss! For me it was the incredible quiet that tops everything about a SSD. It's also like having a giant ram drive. 🙂🙂
Definitely worth it. It's not only about performance. It's about reliability and efficiency. The SSD has no moving parts, thus using less power, and also almost eliminating the risk of data loss due to mechanical failure of the HDD.
The thing is, how much storage do you need "on the go". Do you really need that BlueRay rip of the entire starwars series while in class? Or all your vaccation pictures from 10 years back? How much space do you really need for the stuff you use "on the go" + all programs?
Since I started backing my movies up on my external drive I found myself having 95 GB free in OS X out of my 160 GB from the Intel drive, and then I got Windows installed on a 32 GB partition (which I will most likely remove now anyway).
And I rather back things up anyway, because for storage 500 GB isn't enough. And having things split between 2 drives makes you crazy to try to find stuff.
tenderidol
macrumors regular
People dont buy SSDs for storage (that's what the HDDs are for), they are purchased for performance. A car analogy would be a 2-seater sports car vs. a wagon (both in terms of storage and performance).
A 160GB SSD is plenty for me, since I keep all the files that I dont need daily (e.g., pictures, movies, etc) in a firewire 800 equipped portable external that travels with the computer. I could have been more than OK even with an 80GB Intel X25 SSD, but that puts extra pressure when deciding what is "SSD write worthy or not" 😀
What are you talking about? SSD is all about PERFORMANCE. The fact that SSD has no moving parts, hence utilizing less power and eliminating risk and what not are all extra benefits but when deciding to switch to SSD, it's all about thinking about how much faster can I run a certain application or the machine for that matter. Not because you are eliminating loss of data. SSD card are still prone to loss of data.
Have you ever used an SSD drive versus a mechanical drive? Complete night and day. Unfortunately, the pricing of a really high GB SSD drive is not worth it at this time.
also, how much of a battery life increase could i expect from switching to SSD, ive heard as little as 5% increase which is like 20 mins better. This isnt a crucial issue for me because the battery is so good already, but longer life is better since i sit in 8-9 hour classes often.
MBHockey
macrumors 601
Could you provide a link? I'm not being a smart-ass, I'm genuinely interested to see them.
I have a G2 intel and it's magnificent.
MBHockey
macrumors 601
I don't think you should expect any significant increase in battery life. I've owned two SSDs (OCZ Vertex, which died, and now a G2 intel.)
I didn't notice an increase in battery life over the stock HDD with either drive.
But another thing is that they are dead silent. I didn't realize how noisy HDDs were until I replaced it.
Short answer: probably NO
Keep in mind that SSDs are really only taking off now and there are still a lot of issues.
If you expect an SSD to work just like your current HDD - only faster - then you're in for a rude awakening.
Firstly you really have to do your research. You need to know your
- flash types,
- controller chips,
- drivers,
- manufacturer,
- quality of their customer support (Macintosh in particular),
- types of files you're typically using (many small or many large files, etc.)
Furthermore drives themselves strike a delicate balance between
- cost,
- storage capacity,
- speed (both initial and after usage over time) and
- quality.
And lastly you need to know the do's and don'ts of SSDs versus HDDs.
Everyone and their friend seems to suggest to go with Intel drives.
But that's really a bit short sighted.
Firstly their capacities aren't that great, 160GB tops.
Secondly even their drivers have issues and can cause drives to lock up or fail, as recently as last week were a major issue with TRIM support in Windows 7 crept up. Users actually did lose data over this!
I'm not saying Intel is bad, but you need to be aware that even Intel has issues.
Maximum data read and write times are also not necessarily the whole picture. In fact Intel's drives at 70-100MB/s are actually rather slow compared to newer 200+MB/s drives out there from Samsung or OCZ.
SSD drivers need to solve two issues (as opposed to HDD drivers):
- Wear Leveling: flash cells can only be erased so many times then they're dead, so a driver needs to ensure all the cells are written once before writing any cell for the second time, and so on.
- Smart Erasing: a flash cell holds more than one bit of information and half-full cells cannot be erased, so in order to erase a half-full cell its data needs to be moved to another cell first.
Early drives didn't do this as cleverly and SSDs ended up getting slower and slower particularly if the drive reached capacity as data from many half-full cells had to be shifted around before any new data could be written. Suddenly these drives were much slower than HDDs!
Newer drivers do some 'garbage collection' on the fly when the drive is idle so the drive is ready for new writes any time. But not all drivers do garbage collection and not all work well yet.
OCZ had huge issues with garbage collection with their 1.3 vertex drivers, with drives literally locking up - and all data lost. Their latest 1.4 drivers hopefully fix this, but they're so new the verdict is still out.
But this highlights another issue. HDDs typically don't have driver issues anymore and a bad sector means some file data lost. With SSDs a bad driver kills your whole drive and all your data is lost.
Daily backups is a must with SSDs today. Some people even suggested that with SSDs it's not a matter of if your drive will fail some day, but only a matter of when.
Personally I have two OCZ vertex drives and one of them locked up and needed to be sent back to OCZ. Unfortunately their customer service seems a bit slow and after weeks I'm still waiting for my replacement drive.
So that's another concern: how good is the SSD company's customer service, and how well (if at all) they support Macintosh users. Which is particularly an issue when updating drivers. And SSD drivers will need updating. None has mature drivers yet.
Finally you need to know that certain things work completely differently with SSDs than HDDs.
File security is one thing. While on HDDs you can write over the same bits again and again to erase data (even the Finder provides this feature) this doesn't work with SSDs. Currently AFAIK you can only wipe the whole SSD to securely erase data. Individual files you can't erase securely. So your sensitive data can easily be found on your drive even long after you 'securely' erased it.
In fact you should never use the Finder's 'Secure Empty Trash' feature as due to wear leveling this will only 'overwrite' different flash cells needlessly.
Nor should you use any other typical HDDs utilities like defragmentation or sector tuning tools. These will only wear out your flash cells and shorten their life span.
To sum up:
Unless you're willing to do your research, know your SSD do's and don'ts (as opposed to HDDs), accept driver issues (and there will likely be issues even with the best SSDs out there!), arduously make daily backups of all your data, and generally accept to live with all these hassles - then you can consider getting an SSD.
If all you want is a super fast HDD and otherwise peace of mind and ease of use then avoid SSDs - for now.
Long answer:
Keep in mind that SSDs are really only taking off now and there are still a lot of issues.
If you expect an SSD to work just like your current HDD - only faster - then you're in for a rude awakening.
Firstly you really have to do your research. You need to know your
- flash types,
- controller chips,
- drivers,
- manufacturer,
- quality of their customer support (Macintosh in particular),
- types of files you're typically using (many small or many large files, etc.)
Furthermore drives themselves strike a delicate balance between
- cost,
- storage capacity,
- speed (both initial and after usage over time) and
- quality.
And lastly you need to know the do's and don'ts of SSDs versus HDDs.
Everyone and their friend seems to suggest to go with Intel drives.
But that's really a bit short sighted.
Firstly their capacities aren't that great, 160GB tops.
Secondly even their drivers have issues and can cause drives to lock up or fail, as recently as last week were a major issue with TRIM support in Windows 7 crept up. Users actually did lose data over this!
I'm not saying Intel is bad, but you need to be aware that even Intel has issues.
Maximum data read and write times are also not necessarily the whole picture. In fact Intel's drives at 70-100MB/s are actually rather slow compared to newer 200+MB/s drives out there from Samsung or OCZ.
SSD drivers need to solve two issues (as opposed to HDD drivers):
- Wear Leveling: flash cells can only be erased so many times then they're dead, so a driver needs to ensure all the cells are written once before writing any cell for the second time, and so on.
- Smart Erasing: a flash cell holds more than one bit of information and half-full cells cannot be erased, so in order to erase a half-full cell its data needs to be moved to another cell first.
Early drives didn't do this as cleverly and SSDs ended up getting slower and slower particularly if the drive reached capacity as data from many half-full cells had to be shifted around before any new data could be written. Suddenly these drives were much slower than HDDs!
Newer drivers do some 'garbage collection' on the fly when the drive is idle so the drive is ready for new writes any time. But not all drivers do garbage collection and not all work well yet.
OCZ had huge issues with garbage collection with their 1.3 vertex drivers, with drives literally locking up - and all data lost. Their latest 1.4 drivers hopefully fix this, but they're so new the verdict is still out.
But this highlights another issue. HDDs typically don't have driver issues anymore and a bad sector means some file data lost. With SSDs a bad driver kills your whole drive and all your data is lost.
Daily backups is a must with SSDs today. Some people even suggested that with SSDs it's not a matter of if your drive will fail some day, but only a matter of when.
Personally I have two OCZ vertex drives and one of them locked up and needed to be sent back to OCZ. Unfortunately their customer service seems a bit slow and after weeks I'm still waiting for my replacement drive.
So that's another concern: how good is the SSD company's customer service, and how well (if at all) they support Macintosh users. Which is particularly an issue when updating drivers. And SSD drivers will need updating. None has mature drivers yet.
Finally you need to know that certain things work completely differently with SSDs than HDDs.
File security is one thing. While on HDDs you can write over the same bits again and again to erase data (even the Finder provides this feature) this doesn't work with SSDs. Currently AFAIK you can only wipe the whole SSD to securely erase data. Individual files you can't erase securely. So your sensitive data can easily be found on your drive even long after you 'securely' erased it.
In fact you should never use the Finder's 'Secure Empty Trash' feature as due to wear leveling this will only 'overwrite' different flash cells needlessly.
Nor should you use any other typical HDDs utilities like defragmentation or sector tuning tools. These will only wear out your flash cells and shorten their life span.
To sum up:
Unless you're willing to do your research, know your SSD do's and don'ts (as opposed to HDDs), accept driver issues (and there will likely be issues even with the best SSDs out there!), arduously make daily backups of all your data, and generally accept to live with all these hassles - then you can consider getting an SSD.
If all you want is a super fast HDD and otherwise peace of mind and ease of use then avoid SSDs - for now.
tenderidol
macrumors regular
Although you have some valid points, this is the most "pessimistic" post regarding SSDs. You make it sound like HDDs come with zero issues, they dont fail and require any maintenance. Both SSDs and HDDs have pluses and minuses. The second generation Intel SSDs resolve most of what you are describing above (e.g., garbage collection, Mac compatibility, etc). If you worry about hard drives, having an SSD vs. HDD should not make any difference.
zw-gator
macrumors 6502a
My MBP is my main computer. If I had a MBA that I just used at school, I may go with an SSD, but who cares if word opens in 4 seconds vs. 0.5?
tenderidol
macrumors regular
Exactly! This is a personal choice. It's not just MS Word opens in 0.5 second gain with SSDs. There is a lot to it... If you are happy with your HDD and dont have the need for an SSD, that's great. If people have the funds and the will to put SSDs in the MBPs, that's great as well. There is no need to justify it one way or the other, since it's a personal choice.
SnowLeopard2008
macrumors 604
SSDs are a waste of money at this point. For smaller systems where every extra bit of speed and performance is crucial (netbooks, nettops, etc.) then a small SSD is better than an HDD. Those systems tend to store very little data.
For bigger systems like desktops and full feature laptops, SSDs are a waste of money. It offers very little performance gains. All the benchmarks I've seen simply state "I can open X number of apps in like 1 second!" or something along the lines. There are no real world performance gains. If I open Word in 0.5 seconds as opposed to 10 seconds even, would I pay more than 5x the cost per GB? No.
I can get a nice 1TB HDD for about $100. I don't have to worry about disk space constraints. For the same $100, I can't even get an 80GB SSD. I'm no power user but I'm currently using about 100GB out of my 320GB HD. I don't have a photo library either.
Conclusion: If I were smart, I'd put that $100 into a better processor or graphics card. Or even better, into a bank account.
For bigger systems like desktops and full feature laptops, SSDs are a waste of money. It offers very little performance gains. All the benchmarks I've seen simply state "I can open X number of apps in like 1 second!" or something along the lines. There are no real world performance gains. If I open Word in 0.5 seconds as opposed to 10 seconds even, would I pay more than 5x the cost per GB? No.
I can get a nice 1TB HDD for about $100. I don't have to worry about disk space constraints. For the same $100, I can't even get an 80GB SSD. I'm no power user but I'm currently using about 100GB out of my 320GB HD. I don't have a photo library either.
Conclusion: If I were smart, I'd put that $100 into a better processor or graphics card. Or even better, into a bank account.
