SSD general ?, and SSD in a 2008 2.8 8-core?

[VirtualRain]

LOL... here we go again.

If I were you, I would:

- Dual X25-M's in RAID0 for all your OSX stuff... Use IcyDock 2.5" adapters at $20 each to use them in the bays.
- A large drive for your multimedia files or two in RAID0 if you really want to rock the performance there as well
- A fifth drive for Windows although you could use bootcamp on your multimedia drive for Windows if you want (you could install this in the optical bay if you run RAID0 for your multimedia files)

This shouldn't cost much more and the performance in OSX will knock your socks off.

 

[Tesselator]

That will indeed perform better. And especially if you keep the 3-drive RAID0 by putting any one of the now total 5 drives under the Optical drive in the bottom bay. A 2-SSD RAID0 screams. Maybe close to 6 or 8 mechanical drives in RAID0.

 

[Demonfart]

This is mostly for the OP's question of how the SSD actually feels. I just installed an OCZ Vertex 60g SSD in my new Octo-core Mac Pro and while it is indeed super insanely fast for some things, I have to say, it's not quite as night and day as I suspected it would be for actual work.

Basically everything launches real fast but for actual work (I'm an art director/lead designer, do lots of large format print/magazine ads/motion design) I don't see all that much difference. For example, when working on a 4GB poster in Photoshop CS4, the app launches real fast but I don't see a whole lot of difference with how it handles my files when working between my new SSD install and my stock Apple hard drive install.

Completely subjective compared to the actual data you fine gents/ladies have been using to back up your arguments, but I think a little real world comparison goes a long way. In my experience the SSD is a 'fun' upgrade, makes startups and app launching ludicrously fast, but so far for what I do to make money it seems to me that it's more of a novelty of sorts; which is not to say that's a bad thing, but rather, for a working professional in my field (print/web/broadcast design) it's probably not going to get you much farther than "holy **** I didn't even see a boot screen when I restarted!" compared to some of the other suggestions I've been reading about here.

 

[nuckinfutz]

Completely subjective compared to the actual data you fine gents/ladies have been using to back up your arguments, but I think a little real world comparison goes a long way. In my experience the SSD is a 'fun' upgrade, makes startups and app launching ludicrously fast, but so far for what I do to make money it seems to me that it's more of a novelty of sorts; which is not to say that's a bad thing, but rather, for a working professional in my field (print/web/broadcast design) it's probably not going to get you much farther than "holy **** I didn't even see a boot screen when I restarted!" compared to some of the other suggestions I've been reading about here.

A SSD improves the performance of storage greatly over your rank and file 7200 rpm desktop HDD. However depending on your configuration you may not notice a huge difference whithin an app suite like CS4. The way the CS suite likes to work places more stress on having a good amount of RAM and it seeks to avoid hitting the HDD which is orders of magnitude slower than main memory. You would only notice a slightly improved performance with SSD if you were hitting the discs pretty hard. As of this point CS4 isn't really storage intensive for systems with adequate RAM.

 

[VirtualRain]

That will indeed perform better. And especially if you keep the 3-drive RAID0 by putting any one of the now total 5 drives under the Optical drive in the bottom bay. A 2-SSD RAID0 screams. Maybe close to 6 or 8 mechanical drives in RAID0.

Did you fall and hit your head!? Quick, someone dispatch an ambulance for Tesselator!

 

[Tesselator]

Did you fall and hit your head!? Quick, someone dispatch an ambulance for Tesselator!

Hehehe... Oh come on. This is way different than comparing one 80GB SSD drive to three 1.5TB Drives in a RAID0 stripe for exactly the same price. <wink>

 

[nanofrog]

LOL... here we go again.

If I were you, I would:

- Dual X25-M's in RAID0 for all your OSX stuff... Use IcyDock 2.5" adapters at $20 each to use them in the bays.
- A large drive for your multimedia files or two in RAID0 if you really want to rock the performance there as well
- A fifth drive for Windows although you could use bootcamp on your multimedia drive for Windows if you want (you could install this in the optical bay if you run RAID0 for your multimedia files)

This shouldn't cost much more and the performance in OSX will knock your socks off.

A very nice setup , but the way the OP described the setup, I assumed additional SSD's wasn't to be considered. DOH..

 

[Loa]

As of this point CS4 isn't really storage intensive for systems with adequate RAM.

Exactly.

If you want a SSD to speed up your CS4, you have two choices: stay at 2-3GB of RAM (forcing the apps to go to your very fast SSD for scratch), or save your files on the SSD.

If you don't want to do the first and use a large HD (or RAID0) for your files, a SSD won't make any difference at all once the app is loaded.

But if you have the luxury of storing your CS4 on your SSD, the open/save times will be reduced by a few orders of magnitude. But I say "luxury" precisely because "real-estate" cost a &*#$ load on a SSD.

That's why I'm looking at buying a decent RAID0 before ever thinking of geting a SSD as boot: if CS4 ever needs to scratch, it'll have the fast RAID, and you'll be able to store your files on that as-fast-as-a-SSD RAID.

Perfect set-up for me: SSD as boot volume with OS and apps + 4-HDD RAID0 for everything else.

Loa

 

[seisend]

LOL... here we go again.

If I were you, I would:

- Dual X25-M's in RAID0 for all your OSX stuff... Use IcyDock 2.5" adapters at $20 each to use them in the bays.
- A large drive for your multimedia files or two in RAID0 if you really want to rock the performance there as well
- A fifth drive for Windows although you could use bootcamp on your multimedia drive for Windows if you want (you could install this in the optical bay if you run RAID0 for your multimedia files)

This shouldn't cost much more and the performance in OSX will knock your socks off.

hmm. Well I think this will be to expensive and I think one x25-m for the OS's is by far enough. Two of them would be to extreme and for me totally wasted money. Also I need much space for my sound and video librarys.

I am going to setup my mac pro like this:

(placed in opticaldrive2)

SSD - 80 GB - System HD (OS X and Windows OS)

Bay1. HDD - 2TB Macintosh HD (Applications and Librarys) RAID0
Bay2. HDD - 2TB Macintosh HD (Applications and Librarys) RAID0
Bay3. HDD - 2TB Macintosh HD (Applications and Librarys) RAID0
Bay4. HDD - 1TB Windows HD (Windows Applications installed)

external Backup HD - 640* GB (Backup and Files)
external TimeMachine HD 1-2TB (Backup of RAID0 Bay1-3.)


*original Mac Pro standart HD

Thanks guys for the responses !

 

[VirtualRain]

Now I think I fell and hit my head because in this case, I don't think you will really gain much from the SSD. The beauty in it is really having instant access to your OS, Apps, and working files. The more you shift off the SSD, the less value it has to you. You may as well just save yourself the $300 and run everything off the 3-drive array of magnetic disks.

EDIT: <recovering conciousness> If you still go ahead with it, be prepared to want to buy two or three more... because as soon as you experience the speed of the SSD, you will want to put as much of your workflow on it as possible!

 

[bajee]

The problem with Raid-0's is the failure rate doubles. That's why you have to have a sort of redundancy with it, usually RAID 1+0, which also doubles your required drive, so instead of 2 drives you need 4 drives.

Now what's good with SSD, is that it is immune from the most common HDD failure a head crash. It is also more shock resistant (probably more than 40x) and can handle more extreme temperatures with that of an HDD. For instance, you're tower accidentally fall, SSD will have definitely have a better chance on having your data intact.

So having a raid 0 with SSD without redundancy makes more sense than HDD.

here's a video of HDD vs SSD in real life performance test, check out the last clip about the vibration test:
hdd vs ssd

The good thing about the SSDs is their sustained read and write. In conventional harddrives, the read and write goes slower as it reads on the edge of the disk platter. that's why it can go from 30MB/sec to 90MB/sec, its not consistent, it depends on where the data is located. For SSD, it is always the same which is probably because of their super slow latency, .01ms, vs 16ms of conventional hard drives.

Now this is where SSD real shines - random read and write performance. Conventional disk (HDD)'s problem is their seek time, if you access data all over the disk, the latency builds up and all your other components have to wait, e.g. cpu and memory. With the very low latency of SSD has, accessing data on random parts is isn't a problem on SSD

See the chart below on how conventional HDD perform poorly on ramdom reads/writes.

Random read

Random write

Looking at the graph, the mechanical drives, including the VelociRaptor doesn't even hit 1mb, that's why they aren't even visible in the graph LOL

What does this mean, OSX, Windows, and most applications usually use random reads and random writes in 4kb to 64kb writes.

Quoting from Anandtech

"The mechanical disks however do a lot worse. While the Intel X25-M took 3.5 minutes to extract the 5GB archive, the VelociRaptor took over 17 minutes."


That's 13.5 minutes descrepancy! So VelociRaptor is 480% slower in this particular test.

I guess, that explain what's the hype on SSD is about. If you are heavy on writes, I suggest you to try the intel x25-e, its write speed is double to that of x25-m.

 

[bajee]

SSD rulez, nuff said!

 

[nuckinfutz]

The question is :

"Is Apple going to allow OS X to boot from a PCI-Express SSD?"

Once we get the SSD off the SATA bus and onto a higher speed bus
we will really be able to see what it can do.

I'm anxiously awaiting the results of the Fusion IO Ioxtreme. They claim 520MBps avg bandwidth which is near 2.5x what today's SSD offer plus i've heard they will support RAID like features. Lordy.

 

[nanofrog]

The question is :

"Is Apple going to allow OS X to boot from a PCI-Express SSD?"

Once we get the SSD off the SATA bus and onto a higher speed bus
we will really be able to see what it can do.

I'm anxiously awaiting the results of the Fusion IO Ioxtreme. They claim 520MBps avg bandwidth which is near 2.5x what today's SSD offer plus i've heard they will support RAID like features. Lordy.

Hmm...80GB for $895... I think I'll have to pass.

Also, 6Gb/s SATA interface (750MB/s theoretical max) components (and some products are already out) are showing up in distribution channels, and the drives shouldn't be too far behind. That would give the model linked a run performance wise, and may come in cheaper.

We'll have to wait and see I think.

 

[bajee]

SATA 2 caps out around 300MB/sec, contrary to popular belief, this cap is not for the whole subset of SATA drives, meaning if you have 2 flash drives, capable of 300MB/sec, you can actually have 600MB/sec, and 3 fast drives can get 900MB/sec.

I guess SSD are still here to stay, even with faster PCIE options, those PCIE solutions are raid-0 configurations of SSDs anyway. I hope they roll out SATA 3 soon, and have SSD that can achive 600MB per sec per drive

 

[nuckinfutz]

Hmm...80GB for $895... I think I'll have to pass.

Also, 6Gb/s SATA interface (750MB/s theoretical max) components (and some products are already out) are showing up in distribution channels, and the drives shouldn't be too far behind. That would give the model linked a run performance wise, and may come in cheaper.

We'll have to wait and see I think.

Surprisingly it's about the same price as a SLC 64GB Intel SSD but this delivers twice the performance in read I wonder what the write speeds will be like.

 

[nanofrog]

SATA 2 caps out around 300MB/sec, contrary to popular belief, this cap is not for the whole subset of SATA drives, meaning if you have 2 flash drives, capable of 300MB/sec, you can actually have 600MB/sec, and 3 fast drives can get 900MB/sec.

Those speeds are also per port, so to essentially multiply them (RAID 0), each drive does need it's own.

Multiple drives on a single port is possible, but you need to use a Port Mulitplier chip. They're slower though, as they switch the port between the drives. Current products (PM chip) available list 250MB/s as their throughput limit. With SATA going to 6Gb/s, hopefully it won't take long for a newer generation of PM chips to surface running 500MB/s. It would certainly be nice as an inexpensive mass storage solution.

I guess SSD are still here to stay, even with faster PCIE options, those PCIE solutions are raid-0 configurations of SSDs anyway. I hope they roll out SATA 3 soon, and have SSD that can achive 600MB per sec per drive

Patience. They'll show eventually.

Surprisingly it's about the same price as a SLC 64GB Intel SSD but this delivers twice the performance in read I wonder what the write speeds will be like.

PCIe definitely has the advantage, as the bus is capable of higher throughputs than 6Gb/s of the new SATA spec. Really expensive though. I'd love to actually get my hands on the 320Gb Duo model, but I'm scared to see the price.

 

[Tesselator]

Now I think I fell and hit my head because in this case, I don't think you will really gain much from the SSD.

Indeed you must have. This is what I was saying in our last round of exchanges. 3-Drive RAID is better for storage, for price, and with about the same or faster speed as a single SSD. It also seems to have a better error rate than SSD.

The beauty in it is really having instant access to your OS, Apps, and working files. The more you shift off the SSD, the less value it has to you. You may as well just save yourself the $300 and run everything off the 3-drive array of magnetic disks.

At 80gigs there's not much you can put on there. What are they formatted? 72Gig? And you want at lest 10GB free so you can actually use it. That's ~60GB.

EDIT: <recovering conciousness> If you still go ahead with it, be prepared to want to buy two or three more... because as soon as you experience the speed of the SSD, you will want to put as much of your workflow on it as possible!

Now, there's the fanboy in you that we know and love.

 

[bajee]

At 80gigs there's not much you can put on there. What are they formatted? 72Gig? And you want at lest 10GB free so you can actually use it. That's ~60GB

shucks, that's quite true, you really have to pay premium to get a mere 80gig drive, where all of us are accustomed to Terrabytes of storage.

Good thing Snow Leopard will be coming at half the footprint, a leaner, less bloated and more efficient Leopard. This will give us more storage to use with. Now this is a real treat for all those SSD lovers out there.

I remember my professor in programming showing us two different solutions in programming, one has 1,000s line of code and the other one has 200 line of code. He was teaching us how to program efficiently.

That's how the German get so good with programming, because they were stuck with little storage to write their programs with and they were force to write efficient programs without bloat.

I hope the advent of the SSD will also make people write better/efficient/less bloated programs. Like Apple did to all their core apps, it is possible.

 

[nuckinfutz]

Good thing Snow Leopard will be coming at half the footprint, a leaner, less bloated and more efficient Leopard. This will give us more storage to use with. Now this is a real treat for all those SSD lovers out there.

Agreed. I'm tired of the bloat in OS X. Tired of downloading dmg that are twice as large because they're Universal Binary. Tired of needing tools like Xslimmer and Monolingual to strip out languages and other stuff I never use. Tired of printer drivers for printers I don't even own being loaded and taking up storage I've paid for.

I should be able to run my boot drive easily in under 64 GB and that's with mondo applications and room to grow.

Let's get back onto some innovative hardware design. I want Apple to pull the boot drive from the SATA bus and give it a faster link to the processor and RAM and leave the SATA drive bays for high density storage.

 

[Boomhowler]

...
Good thing Snow Leopard will be coming at half the footprint,...

Uhm, wasn't it like only a couple of GBs less? Ah, maybe you're right

I just have to tell you a story about my newly bought Macbook Pro 13" with a OCZ vertex 120GB drive. It's insanely nice. My friend bought a seagate 7200-disk for his laptop with otherwise the same specs. It's not an even comparison. I still haven't seen a spinning circus ball and the computer seems to be almost snappier than a Mac Pro "for everyday use". I imagine that it would be overrun by some simple PS, video encoding or MatLab-task, but for standard laptop use it's heaven.

Ok, my friend got 4 times the storage amount for a third of the price, so if it is storage that is most important "he wins", but I have a stationary computer for storage. I still think that a SSD is one of the best upgrades for a laptop, although expensive. But I wouldn't think twice about doing the same thing again (well, not soon.. as I said, they are not cheap)

 

[Tesselator]

I agree, on laptops SSD really shines. There's much larger performance contrast when comparing a laptop HDD to an SSD. For a laptop I think these are indeed the best upgrade you can make for your machine.

 

[Loa]

As Tess said: if you only need general snappyness with very very small disk space on your laptop, then SSDs are the best. But...

. I imagine that it would be overrun by some simple PS, video encoding or MatLab-task, but for standard laptop use it's heaven.

You imagine??? With enough RAM, your SSD won't make any difference at all on the 3 tasks you mentioned. Your friend's similar MBP with his 7200 HD will get the same performance on those tasks, and the MP will smoke both of you.

A lot of people (maybe not you) don't realize that SSDs will only make huge differences when the storage speed is the bottleneck. Give your computer enough RAM and the bottleneck will be, once again, your CPU.

Loa

 

[Tesselator]

Give your computer enough RAM and the bottleneck will be, once again, your CPU.

There's three separate things being discussed here each with a few subsystem dependancies and all participants at the performance party.

There's RAM speed and it's dependancy on buss architecture and speed.
There's the CPU speed and it's dependancy on buss attributes.
And then there's storage device I/O speeds and it's dependancy on the buss.

By "dependancy" I just mean that it's speed and throughput will be affected by it.

In Mac Pros of the one's I've looked into anyway, the RAM speed is fairly well matched to the CPU so there's little contention there.

Ideally we would want a storage device capable of fully saturating the buss that it's on. Also ideally we would want a buss that is about the same speed as the destination device - RAM. This is where personal computers lack terrifically. SATA bus speeds are slow and drive speeds are even slower - even SSD. Consider that a fast HDD only does about 120 or so megabytes per second. And I forget just now what our SATA link speed is but I think about 375 MB/s per link. Compare this though to RAM speed which is 10GB/s and upwards. Anytime we use I/O to or from a storage device there's a massive bottleneck implied. Even 5 or 6 drive SSD RAID0 is only capable of about 1 GB/s. That's ten times slower than the slowest intel Mac Pro's memory and almost 40 times slower than the RAM in the fastest 2009 model.

Unless your system is paging out a lot to disk having more RAM doesn't really shift the bottleneck over to the CPU. Maybe by the fact that it reduces the amount the drive I/O bottleneck is encountered it kinda does <shrug>.

So of course we all should want a storage device buss capable of 40GB/s and storage devices somewhere close to that!


Hehehe, I'm such a nerd.

 

[Loa]

Hehehe, I'm such a nerd.

Haha: aren't we all?

But if I understand you correctly, we're saying the same thing: since drives (HDD or SSD) are the slowest primay things in our systems by far, then by having enough ram will give us the best performance.

In PS, not having to use scratch because we have enough ram means geting the best performance our machine can give us.

Loa