Performance Boost - SSD or more RAM

[disconap]

He was just showing off the speed, the speed is constant on an SSD regardless of opening or closing or whatever. The OS overall responsiveness is important and in this case, SSD beats anything on the market for providing the most performance boost.

Oh, no doubt, I love the ssd in my netbook as well as the two in my tower. Just saying that the bigger boost in my experience has been in opening and closing apps and start up/shutdown, the save times aren't dramatically better (but better nonetheless). And of course, an SSD isn't going to improve any processor intensive performance (I've noticed next to no difference working in Flash, for example). Still, worth every penny spent...

 

[striatedglutes]

my vote for SSD.

Try to go to an apple store and run comparisons with apple's SSD vs. stock hard drive, then just imagine it being even better with an intel x-25.

5400 vs. 7200 is a joke. don't fall for it.

 

[jtmx29]

SSD's have far better read speeds, while the write speeds are about the same as a 7200 rpm drive. If you think about it though how many writes do you really do?, not many! The OS should boot noticeably faster.

 

[MikhailT]

SSD's have far better read speeds, while the write speeds are about the same as a 7200 rpm drive. If you think about it though how many writes do you really do?, not many! The OS should boot noticeably faster.

That's not entirely true plus OS boot time is not that important considering most people nowaday sleep/hibernate their systems.

There are two different situation for read/writing, sequential and random read/writes. Sequential read/write: this measures the speed of the device as it read/writes data in long sequential blocks, it's always the fastest, commonly file transfers. In this mode, SSD has the highest speed in read in most cases maxing out the SATA II interface limit at 250MBps. Write speed, depending on the quality of the SSD as well as the type of memory cells (SLC/MLC), can be much higher than HD. Low end budget SSD are commonly around 80MBps with medium at 125MBps and high end at 200MBps, this all with MLC SSDs. SLC SSDs (expensive) are almost the same speed as the read speed at 200-250MBps. HD tends to max out less than 100MBps in read/write (higher density HD can do better but most likely will never max out SATA II bandwidth anytime soon).

Random speed (simple meaning: working with multiple files at different places):No HDD platter on this planet can beat SSD due to the nature of the technology, specifically the spinning platter vs static flash cells. SSD has a seek time of 0.1ms while HD averages around 8-12ms. Average speed HD can be like 0-4MBps in read while 0-1MBps in write speed. Good SSDs can get 20-40MBps in read while 10-30MBps in write speed. This is usually the most impressive feature of SSDs.

 

[jtmx29]

That's not entirely true plus OS boot time is not that important considering most people nowaday sleep/hibernate their systems.

There are two different situation for read/writing, sequential and random read/writes. Sequential read/write: this measures the speed of the device as it read/writes data in long sequential blocks, it's always the fastest, commonly file transfers. In this mode, SSD has the highest speed in read in most cases maxing out the SATA II interface limit at 250MBps. Write speed, depending on the quality of the SSD as well as the type of memory cells (SLC/MLC), can be much higher than HD. Low end budget SSD are commonly around 80MBps with medium at 125MBps and high end at 200MBps, this all with MLC SSDs. SLC SSDs (expensive) are almost the same speed as the read speed at 200-250MBps. HD tends to max out less than 100MBps in read/write (higher density HD can do better but most likely will never max out SATA II bandwidth anytime soon).

Random speed (simple meaning: working with multiple files at different places):No HDD platter on this planet can beat SSD due to the nature of the technology, specifically the spinning platter vs static flash cells. SSD has a seek time of 0.1ms while HD averages around 8-12ms. Average speed HD can be like 0-4MBps in read while 0-1MBps in write speed. Good SSDs can get 20-40MBps in read while 10-30MBps in write speed. This is usually the most impressive feature of SSDs.

Thanks for clarifying!

 

[ayeying]

If you want a performance boost with Virtual Machines, stick with Conventional hard drives unless you're getting a top of the line SSD like from Intel. Cheap/Lower End SSDs are HORRIBLE with concurrent Write and Reads and small data blocks. With VMs, you'll do a lot of read/writes on the drive.

Currently, I run a small Virtual Machine farm, even though together I can fit them all on my MacBook Air's SSD, I don't and use an External 500GB 7200RPM hard drive via USB. The external hard drive runs the virtual machines faster and more smooth than the SSD. (Defragging every week helps with performance for my HDD too) Don't ask me why, but I don't see any lag with my system when I'm running it off the external drive. Even boots up faster too.

 

[dyn]

Current virtualisation software for the Mac is quite good at keeping cpu and ram usage at very low rates. Disk I/O on the other hand is quite a big problem, especially when doing things like resuming/pausing vm's, running virus scans (a full scan, quick scan or on access scan), updating or installing software and creating/restoring snapshots. The hard disk is the biggest bottleneck. Upgrading to a faster disk will bring speed increases when you run a single vm and when you run multiple vm's (the speed increase is always there). Upgrading ram is only useful when running multiple vm's or when you need more ram in OS X or the vm due to some application.

From personal experience I can say that upgrading to a ssd (OCZ Vertex) brought the biggest speed increase. With 4 GB of memory and a ssd I can run up to 4 vm's who are doing lots of stuff like resuming, installing, updating, etc. without me noticing it in OS X. Before I was only able to run up to 2 vm's but I had to be patient when they were doing things like resuming, installing software/updates, etc. because it slowed down the entire system. Even when running 1 vm I noticed the performance hit in I/O.

I have to agree with ayeying on the ssd, don't buy a cheap ssd because the cheap ones have bad performance in the end. Buy the Intel X25-m or something with the Indilinx Barefoot controller (like the OCZ Vertex) or the upcoming Sandforce controller. The standard MBA ssd is known for its bad performance btw, which is the main reason why people are upgrading to a Runcore ssd.