Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Solid State Drives for Mac Pro

Get the Intel G2 SSD.
They are superior to all other SSDs with Samsung or Indilix Controller.

In fact they don't have such high sequential writing speeds, but that does not matter at all if you consider it to be your OS disk.
They are by far faster if we consider reading speeds and best of all, they don't loose speed after some time.
Other SSDs loose almost a third of their original speed after some weeks.
 
ajbrehm said:
Read this:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001304.html

Is there anything like the Crucial 128 GB SSD available as a drive module for the current Mac Pro?

I currently have two 1 TB SATA drives and would love to add a solid state drive for the OS.
Click to expand...

Every SATA SSD will work in a Mac Pro if you adapt the the typical 2,5" form factor to the Mac Pro's 3,5" fixtures. Adaptors are available from Icy Dock, Kingston and others. You can even fit a 5,25" x4 enclosure in your second ODD bay and run arrays of SSDs with additional SATA ports.

Intel Gen2 "Postville" definitely is the way to go.
 
gugucom said:
Every SATA SSD will work in a Mac Pro if you adapt the the typical 2,5" form factor to the Mac Pro's 3,5" fixtures. Adaptors are available from Icy Dock, Kingston and others. You can even fit a 5,25" x4 enclosure in your second ODD bay and run arrays of SSDs with additional SATA ports.

Intel Gen2 "Postville" definitely is the way to go.
Click to expand...

This sounds good.

How do I go about this? Do I buy a SATA SSD and an adaptor and I am good to go or is there anything else I should look out for?
 
Transporteur said:
Get the Intel G2 SSD.
They are superior to all other SSDs with Samsung or Indilix Controller.

In fact they don't have such high sequential writing speeds, but that does not matter at all if you consider it to be your OS disk.
They are by far faster if we consider reading speeds and best of all, they don't loose speed after some time.
Other SSDs loose almost a third of their original speed after some weeks.
Click to expand...

Now that OCZ and Indilinx have implemented both TRIM or Garbage Collection into the firmware, your comments about other SSD's losing speed over time is no longer true.

http://hothardware.com/News/OCZ-and-Indilinx-Collaborate-On-New-SSD-Garbage-Collection-Scheme/

Mark
 
gugucom said:
Every SATA SSD will work in a Mac Pro if you adapt the the typical 2,5" form factor to the Mac Pro's 3,5" fixtures.
Click to expand...

I don't think that is entirely accurate. When looking at getting an SSD drive I ran across a couple of drives that were reported to not work in the Mac and the mfg pulled OSX as a supported OS with no driver for the specific controller in the drive being the reason given. I didn't keep the info to back this up since I decided on an Intel for myself.

That being said, the Intel SSD is the way to go. It is the 'best' drive out there right now and is competitively priced when compared to the other good SSD drives. The problem is that no one has them (80GB models) in stock for reasonable prices right now. You either pay an extra $50 or so to get one now, or wait a month or two for delivery.
 
Mark Booth said:
Now that OCZ and Indilinx have implemented both TRIM or Garbage Collection into the firmware, your comments about other SSD's losing speed over time is no longer true.

http://hothardware.com/News/OCZ-and-Indilinx-Collaborate-On-New-SSD-Garbage-Collection-Scheme/

Mark
Click to expand...

TRIM is not implemented in OSX. So for Mac users, it's still a legitimate concern and the Intel's are more robust without TRIM than other drives.

Bartman01 said:
I don't think that is entirely accurate. When looking at getting an SSD drive I ran across a couple of drives that were reported to not work in the Mac and the mfg pulled OSX as a supported OS with no driver for the specific controller in the drive being the reason given.
Click to expand...

That's relatively ancient history now... no longer a concern.

ajbrehm said:
How do I go about this? Do I buy a SATA SSD and an adaptor and I am good to go or is there anything else I should look out for?
Click to expand...

Just get one of these adapters and one of these (160GB) or one of these (80GB). Then you are GTG!
 
In my view there are two important SSD compatibility issues which are unrelated to performance:

1. You must not enable defragmentation in Windows.


2. You should use Intel made drives for optimum RAID card compatibility.
 
Mark Booth said:
Now that OCZ and Indilinx have implemented both TRIM or Garbage Collection into the firmware, your comments about other SSD's losing speed over time is no longer true.

http://hothardware.com/News/OCZ-and-Indilinx-Collaborate-On-New-SSD-Garbage-Collection-Scheme/

Mark
Click to expand...

Considering that OS X does not support TRIM (yet), my comment is still true.

And as a matter of fact, Intel released a firmware update for the Postville drives which enables TRIM. Unfortunately Windows 7 users had some issues with the new firmware, so Intel pulled it back.
They are working on fixing it, so the day OS X will support TRIM, the Intel drives should definitely have implemented it.
 
Transporteur said:
Considering that OS X does not support TRIM (yet), my comment is still true.
Click to expand...

As I said in my original message, OCZ and Indilinx have implemented BOTH TRIM and Garbage Collection. You get to choose which firmware version. Garbage Collection works in the SSD firmware and doesn't rely on the OS. So, I stand by my comments.... OCZ SSDs with the new 1.41GC firmware will not slow down over time in a Mac. Please read the link I included.

Mark
 
OCZ Indilinx garbage collection

FWIW, Anand brings up an interesting point in relation to the on-drive garbage collecting and speculates that it is a poor substitute for TRIM:

"Presumably this isn’t without some impact to battery life in a notebook. Furthermore, it’s impossible to tell what impact this has on the lifespan of the drive. If a drive is simply reorganizing data on the fly into a better (higher performing) state, that’s a lot of reads and writes when you’re doing nothing at all. And unfortunately, there’s no way to switch it off. "

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=14
 
Just get the Intel and be done with it. It will work fine now and if OSX ever supports TRIM then you're good-to-go with that too! BTW, No one ever got fired for buying Intel! :p
 
VirtualRain said:
Just get the Intel and be done with it. It will work fine now and if OSX ever supports TRIM then you're good-to-go with that too! BTW, No one ever got fired for buying Intel! :p
Click to expand...

Ok, again, what do I buy and which adaptor do I need?

I am really not a hardware person. This is for a 2009 Mac Pro.
 
When decent 300+GB SSD become available for a price I'm willing to spend for my personal Mac, that is probably the next "performance" improvement I'll make. When the hard drive gets hit, that is the main slowdown I see in my Mac Pro. A non SSD possibillity would just be to buy a dedicated drive for boot camp, so Windows HD access doesn't affect my normal disk usage.
 
Just imagine what you can do with a RAID0 array from four 80 GB Intel Postville SSDs in the 2nd optical bay. You would need a decent RAID card for it but the disk speed would go through the roof.
 
gugucom said:
Just imagine what you can do with a RAID0 array from four 80 GB Intel Postville SSDs in the 2nd optical bay. You would need a decent RAID card for it but the disk speed would go through the roof.
Click to expand...
Yep.

Expensive, but so is a mechanical based RAID system in Macs, as there's usually a need for adapters and external enclosures. Though the drives can be paralleled to exceed a set of 4x Postvilles for sustained throughputs, and have better write speeds (SSD's not so wonderful for that). SSD would rule for random access though. ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back