I've been thinking of putting a SSD into my Mac Pro... and I liked what I saw from the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD check out the shoot out! just looks like a great upgrade but the price has me on the fence.
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OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD
- Thread starter TheEvilZeppelin
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Well I have just ordered one for my macbook pro, as it seemed the best deal out there in combo with an adapter to replace the optical drive.
Ive upgraded to a SSD for the OS and applications, so I only got the 60GB one. The prices on SSDs are still a bit high, but for me the benefits outweighed the cost.
You just need to think what you want to use it for and whether the price is too high for those benefits.
Ive upgraded to a SSD for the OS and applications, so I only got the 60GB one. The prices on SSDs are still a bit high, but for me the benefits outweighed the cost.
You just need to think what you want to use it for and whether the price is too high for those benefits.
I have a 120GB OWC Mercury Pro Extreme SSD in my Mac Pro, use it as the boot disk. I also have two 7200rpm 1TB Seagate Barracuda drives in a RAID-0 array. The transfer of files between the RAID and the SSD is over 200MB per second!! It's really amazing. And my machine seems quick as lightning. Boot time is just about 10 seconds. It's really fast. The drive was about $319.00 when I bought it, but I've seen 256GB Samsung SSDs on eBay for the same price. Your best bet on an SSD might be on eBay. They have a bunch of OCZ Vertex drives on there as well.
a 60GB can hold all you need, the OS needs about 14GB and Photoshop needs less than 5GB, Lightroom probably less than 10GB.
But...I got the 120GB which is plenty for me because I like to save files to my desktop sometimes. All my music, videos, and downloads go straight to my 2TB RAID 0 array.
To give you an idea, I have my OS and all my apps on my 120GB SSD currently and I have 63.33GB of free space at the moment. So you would be better getting a 100GB or 120GB or even a 256GB if you can afford it. You can find 256GB Samsung SSDs for around $325 on eBay.
Why not move your entire Home dir to your 2TB HD...wouldn't that move your desktop as well? This would give you even more room on your SSD.
Ssd
Thanks for the replay Ward.
I too keep files I am currently working on on my desktop, however I am learning that in doing so, if I have worked on folder full of images in Lighrroom and then move the folder to a storage partition, Lightroom can no long find the cataloge. So, I have to change my work flow regarding using desktop. Thanks for the feedback.
Thanks for the replay Ward.
I too keep files I am currently working on on my desktop, however I am learning that in doing so, if I have worked on folder full of images in Lighrroom and then move the folder to a storage partition, Lightroom can no long find the cataloge. So, I have to change my work flow regarding using desktop. Thanks for the feedback.
Corsair F120
Hi All,
I heard many good things about the OWC Mercury SSDs. Unfortunately, they are not directly available in my country. So instead, I plan to get a Corsair Force 120 GB SSD. It uses the same SandForce controller as the OWC ones, so perhaps it is equally good. I plan to use it in my MacPro2010.
Has anyone heard any negative things about this SSD in a MacPro? Any potential issue?
Thanks.
Hi All,
I heard many good things about the OWC Mercury SSDs. Unfortunately, they are not directly available in my country. So instead, I plan to get a Corsair Force 120 GB SSD. It uses the same SandForce controller as the OWC ones, so perhaps it is equally good. I plan to use it in my MacPro2010.
Has anyone heard any negative things about this SSD in a MacPro? Any potential issue?
Thanks.
Hi, I use Corsair Force 120 GB SSD in my MacPro 2010, no issues so far. I put the SSD in "Icy Dock 2.5" to 3.5" SATA / SSD HDD Converter Tray".
TM will back up any mounted internal drives.
Yes, just point the tune library to the drive it's on. If your SSD is big enough then keep it on the SSD.
What's the fuss about putting your homefolder onto an HDD anyway? Is it just to save space, is it just to BE safe if the boot drive fails or is it actually better for the SSD ?
It most certainly comes down to a lack of budget (or misplaced priorities!
).The obvious path to top performance is to have enough SSD storage for all your OS/Apps/Data but that's not always practical.
It should be everyone's aspiration though.
Thats what I did. I read on a website that suggested against moving your home folder, but I have not had a single problem. When I work on video stuff, audio stuff, Photoshop, and pretty much anything really, I constantly drag stuff to my desktop. I moved my home folder cause I don't want that to cause my SSD to degrade. I explained it a little more here.
What I did is to make an Alias for my iTunes folder in my "Music" folder. This iTunes folder is actually on my 2TB RAID array, and the Alias is called "iTunes" and it is in my music folder.
Users/home/Music/iTunes
The iTunes folder in this directory is an alias called "iTunes" of the folder "iTunes" which is my music library, on my RAID array. That way I can store hundreds of gigs of music and movies and not take up one byte of space on my SSD.
This is what I'm going to do, too. I can't see any reason *not* to move my Home folder. My Desktop, like yours, has become like a temporary scratch disk. I don't want to clutter my SSD with all that.
Firmware Upgrade
I did a firmware upgrade for my OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE 200 GB SSD to the June 2010 update at:
http://eshop.macsales.com/Customized_Pages/Framework.cfm?page=sf_firmware.html
The Windows version does not recognize any Mac partition. I had to clone the drive to another disk, reformat it in the Mac OS to Windows FAT32 so there was no problem for Windows to deal with it. Then I had to run the updater in Windows under Bootcamp. Then I had to go back for the Mac OS, reformat to a Mac partition and clone back the drive. There was supposed to be a Mac version last month but it has not yet been released.
I did a firmware upgrade for my OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE 200 GB SSD to the June 2010 update at:
http://eshop.macsales.com/Customized_Pages/Framework.cfm?page=sf_firmware.html
The Windows version does not recognize any Mac partition. I had to clone the drive to another disk, reformat it in the Mac OS to Windows FAT32 so there was no problem for Windows to deal with it. Then I had to run the updater in Windows under Bootcamp. Then I had to go back for the Mac OS, reformat to a Mac partition and clone back the drive. There was supposed to be a Mac version last month but it has not yet been released.