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SSD Buying Guide

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Hi everyone,
I just bought New MBP 13" i7 model and thinking about to change the HDD to SSD and I found out that Sandisk extreme has some issue with nvidia chipset and does it will affect this model ?

Because I'm in Australia and Sandisk 480Gb extreme here is the best price for its capacity or should I go with samsung 830.

I can't decide about sandisk because not much review with the new model of macbook pro with sandisk extreme speed and performance.

Appreciate your help and suggestion ;)

Sandisk 480Gb Extreme here is $379
Samsung 830 256Gb is $269
 
Some Good SSD Deals for those in the UK here (as in the market for one myself):

256Gb SSD's:

OCZ Vertex 4 256Gb SSD (from Scan.co.uk): £172.94
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256g...-mlc-flash-read-560mb-s-write-510mb-s-120k-io

OCZ Agility 3 240Gb SSD (from Scan.co.uk): £139.49
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/240g...orce-2281-read-525mb-s-write-500mb-s-85k-iops

Samsung 830 Series 256GB SSD (from scan.co.uk): £149.10
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256g...-3-core-mcx-nand-flash-read-520mb-s-write-400

Intel 520 Series 240Gb SSD (from scan.co.uk): £186.29
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/240g...ii-6gb-s-mlc-flash-write-520mb-s-60k-iops-oem

512Gb SSDs:

Samsung 830 series 512Gb SSD (from Amazon): £356.99
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-512...QQ4U/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1345634412&sr=8-2

Crucial M4 512Gb SSD (from scan.co.uk): £299.41
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/512g...mlc-flash-read-500mb-s-write-260mb-s-50k-iops

OCZ Vertex 4 512Gb SSD: £311.41
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/512g...-iii-read-560mb-s-write-510mb-s-120k-iops-max

I'm not biased to Scan.co.uk by the way, they are the cheapest I have seen!
 
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Hi, I'm from Brazil and I''m looking for a SSD. I've been reading a lot about it, but I don't have a conclusion yet. Well there are just a few models on my country, so I need help to choose one of these models:

OCZ Vertex 4 256GB, Intel 520 240GB, Kingston HyperX 240GB, Corsair Perfomance Pro 256GB and Corsair Force GT 240GB.

OCZ, Corsair and Intel cost about $500, Corsair about $575 and Kingston about $450. Yeah, the prices are right, all electronics, cars, etc, are very expensive here due to taxes...

I've read about some problems on SandForce Controllers, is it still happening? Except for Corsair Performance Pro (Marvel Controller) and Vertex 4 (Indilinx), all of them have SandForce Controllers.
 
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I have had an OCZ Agility 3 in an icybox in my core 2 duo iMac 2.4 since Jan 2012 and it runs blazing fast.

Under Lion i suffered quite heavily from spinning beachball syndrome, i say heavily but i mean once a day for say 30 seconds. I happily put up with it confident it was a software problem.

Since ML i have seen it only once or twice in the last 3 weeks and also have updated the firmware.

The speed is phenomenal and well worth it but not without its kinks, i presume more prevalently in older systems.

----------
shmonkus said:
Samsung 830 Series 256GB SSD (from scan.co.uk): £149.10
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/256g...-3-core-mcx-nand-flash-read-520mb-s-write-400
Click to expand...

In the small print beneath it links to Samsung's Website for a cashback promotion to get £20 back!! http://www.samsung.com/uk/student/cashback.html

Seems pretty fricking good!
 
I just bought a Plextor 128GB M5S SSD from amazon for my Macbook Aluminum Unibody (Late 2008). I plan to do a fresh install of Mountain Lion on it. I'm excited! I got a caddy to replace my optical drive as well and put current HDD in it. I'll use the SSD for the OS and applications and the HDD for my docs/music.

Hope it goes well!
 
512 GB Crucial M4 +1

I bought the above SSD for my 2 Ghz 2011 15" MBP and love it. It came with the most up to date firmware (000F) straight from Newegg and I like knowing that I can update it through OSX in the future.

It replaced a 500GB 7200 rpm Seagate momentus (yeah, the hybrid) which was only clocking 60/65 (read/write) in Blackmagic speed test. I cloned the entire HDD over to the SSD (4.5 hours) using Carbon Copy Cloner. Booted from the SSD while plugged into an external to verify, then put it inside the MBP.

Blackmagic speeds are now at 255/475 and I'm amazed at how responsive this machine has become. Aperture picture rendering is nearly instant and everything opens so much faster. I like not having to worry about a spinning hard drive too.

I've gone on to enable trim, turn off sleeping when idle, disabled SMS, and turned off the SSD write before sleep in Terminal. This later step means this beast goes to sleep immediately upon closing the lid (but I risk loosing stored RAM if I loose battery power).
 
RAID 0 issues with Intel 320 series SSD

On a 2009 Mac Pro, I thought I'd try a RAID 0 volume (OS X's software RAID) with a couple of Intel 320 SSDs, 160 GB each, to save some money and get faster performance than SATA II speeds. Mountain Lion installs on each drive fine, but when I try to install it on the RAID 0 volume I get a kernel panic.

I have no problems installing ML on a RAID 0 volume of spinner drives. Never any issues with a single Intel 320 SSD as the boot volume.

Any ideas what's happening? I couldn't find anything about Intel 320 SSD RAID compatibility with Google, but maybe there's some issue with OS X's software RAID? Thanks for any suggestions!

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, it seemed to fit in the SSD thread better than starting a new thread in the Mac Pro forum.
 
FuNGi said:
Blackmagic speeds are now at 255/475 and I'm amazed at how responsive this machine has become. Aperture picture rendering is nearly instant and everything opens so much faster. I like not having to worry about a spinning hard drive too.
Click to expand...

I would have expected a higher speed then that TBH.
I have 2 Samsung 830 SSDs.
The first is a 256GB, and I have just replaced it with a 512GB version.

Both drives give me around 395 Write, and 495 read.
 
Can anyone explain the disparity between certain SSDs' read and write speeds?

My m4 reads at 520/s but write is 261, as shown in the attachment.
 

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Ifti said:
I would have expected a higher speed then that TBH.
I have 2 Samsung 830 SSDs.
The first is a 256GB, and I have just replaced it with a 512GB version.

Both drives give me around 395 Write, and 495 read.
Click to expand...

It's normal for the Crucial M4 to Write at roughly half the speed of the 830. The 830 is close to one of the fastest (and most stable) out there. It's a real pain in the @ss to update frimware on a mac though. I don't think I'll notice how long it takes to write files coming from a HDD :D
 
FuNGi said:
It's normal for the Crucial M4 to Write at roughly half the speed of the 830. The 830 is close to one of the fastest (and most stable) out there. It's a real pain in the @ss to update frimware on a mac though. I don't think I'll notice how long it takes to write files coming from a HDD :D
Click to expand...

Ah, I didn't know that. Probably wouldn't notice much difference I everyday use anyway!
Have fun with your new SSD!
 
I have both the Samsung 830 for my 2011 Mini and the Samsung 470 for my 2008 Unibody Macbook 13". Both are performing pretty well. A few months ago my Macbook's original hard drive was in its last breath and I was considering upgrading to a new Pro but a couple of research here and I replaced the hard drive with the 470 and upgraded the ram to 8GB and WOW! It feels brand new. The programs open up in a snap, it's a lot quieter, and the temps definitely cooled down. Very happy with the upgrade :)
 
Arizor said:
Can anyone explain the disparity between certain SSDs' read and write speeds?

My m4 reads at 520/s but write is 261, as shown in the attachment.
Click to expand...

AFAIK it has to do with the vagaries of BlackMagic. I had the same problems with an upgrade from OWC. The SSD they sent me didn't do well on BlackMagic. I had them send me a copy of SpeedTools (http://www.intechusa.com) and this tested fine. Reads and Writes were comparable and FAST. Unfortunately only the paid version tests SSD performance.
 
drsox said:
AFAIK it has to do with the vagaries of BlackMagic. I had the same problems with an upgrade from OWC. The SSD they sent me didn't do well on BlackMagic. I had them send me a copy of SpeedTools (http://www.intechusa.com) and this tested fine. Reads and Writes were comparable and FAST. Unfortunately only the paid version tests SSD performance.
Click to expand...

BlackMagic uses incompressible data which is the Achilles' Heel of SandForce (the controller that OWC uses).
 
drsox said:
Thanks. Good to know. Does that mean that Sandforce controllers are to be avoided in general if the option is available ?
Click to expand...

It's not that simple. SandForce doesn't do that well with incompressible data but it's one of the fastest when it comes to compressible data (thanks to real-time compression engine). I would say that there are better options than SF based drives (though not because of speed, but because of reliability) such as Samsung 830 but if the price is right, SandForce isn't a bad option.
 
Test done on a 2012 13" MBP.

Ill be adding a Corsair Force GT 240GB SSD to the comparison as soon as it arrives.
 

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Hellhammer said:
It's not that simple. SandForce doesn't do that well with incompressible data but it's one of the fastest when it comes to compressible data (thanks to real-time compression engine). I would say that there are better options than SF based drives (though not because of speed, but because of reliability) such as Samsung 830 but if the price is right, SandForce isn't a bad option.
Click to expand...

OK. Thanks. As I had to get an OWC unit, then I guess I still managed to get a decent option. For my other SSD in another box I did go for the 830, so that was also a decent choice.
 
Arizor said:
Can anyone explain the disparity between certain SSDs' read and write speeds?

My m4 reads at 520/s but write is 261, as shown in the attachment.
Click to expand...

I was wondering the same thing. I have the same reading on my 512MB m4. Are there any settings we can modify to bring up the write to a similar speed of others...
 
Hellhammer said:
Macs with SATA 6Gb/s: This just got a lot harder. I have yet to see a totally trouble-free SATA 6Gb/s SSD. No matter what SSD you pick, there seems to be some issues. All 6Gb/s SandForce based SSDs seem to be having a share of issues which look like firmware related. Intel 510 Series isn’t perfect either. There seem to be random slow downs and long boot times with that SSD. Crucial m4/Micron C400 uses the same controller as Intel 510 Series and thus shares the same issues. In fact, Crucial even pulled MacBook Pro from supported machines list.
Click to expand...

In case circumstances have now changed, are there still issues with 6 Gb/s SSD drives? In particular this drive? I'm weighing up my options at the minute and have identified this one to use in a 2012 MBP.
 
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Need Your Help! 2xCrucial 512 in RAID 0

Okay so:

I'm tired of backups taking 1/2 day due to slow HDs. I've decided on SSD's and wanted to go, "all the way," with a pair of 2xCrucial 512GB in RAID 0 because I need at least 1TB of space on my late 2011 MacBook Pro "13. I have 1 M4 512 right now ($350) and a LaCie 1TB 7200 Little Big Disk ($225) for backup. Before I dive any deeper and grab the second M4 512, I need your guys honest opinion on this idea.

I read through some of the comments and it looks like this is a bad idea:
1) I'm going to have to constantly switch out the SSDs in order to upgrade the Firmware. Has anyone actually gotten the USB Drive method to work?
2) The latest firmware is giving people freezing issues with the "13 MacBook Pro's. How BAD does it get?

Do people have any other issues? Essentially: YAY or NAY on this setup?
 
Looking to get a SSD for thunderbolt external (put in Ministation or Seagate adapter)...sounds like Samsung 830 is a good drive. How difficult is it to update firmware on Mac or is it even necessary? I got rid of all Windows machines so dont know how I would update it.
 
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