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

SSD Options - Opinions

southerndoc

southerndoc

Contributor
Original poster
May 15, 2006
1,889
547
USA
I think I've about convinced myself to buy an SSD -- either 128 or 256GB -- for my MacBook to improve battery life and performance.

Does anyone know the read/write speeds of the SSD's offered on the new MacBooks Pro?

Does anyone have any opinions of Intel v. OCZ or other manufacturers in terms of reliability and performance? I've heard OCZ has some super fast SSD's, but their reliability isn't up to part with Intel.
 
OCZ Vertex are one of the best drives, beating Intel's SSD here and there, but also losing on I/O speed. Intel's drive was fast for when it was released (like over a year ago) but now everyone has had time to make better SSDs. I'mnot saying the Vertex will blow the Intel out of the water, but R, W, burst and cont. R/W, and some smaller things are definately faster speed wise..

The OCZ Indilinx controllers are nice, the OCZ Core 2 Series however, is utter crap.. I read that under the Mac file system, the OCZ Core drives are okay stutter wise..

Intel's are nice, but the prices are still sky high for the storage.

I prefer the Vertex, 120's are around 340 on newegg IIRC.
256's are too expansive for my price range.
I plan to throw a 500GB HDD in the opti bay, so I can have that for storage.
That being said it's hard for me to justify the expenditure for a 120 GB ssd over a 60GB one, since other than bit torrent I don't use any space at all on my computer.

60 gigs is enough for OSX, and a Bootcamp Win 7. I figure all the VMs and other heavy stuff can be stored on the Spinner.

The 300 I'm not spending on the 2.4 uMB (going for the 2.26 entry model now) and the 150 I'd save by going with a smaller SSD is going to be nice especially if I can wait until the Intel Atom n450 equipped netbooks come out this fall...

Anyways, I think Apple uses Samsung SSDs, which I love Sammie-everything, but compared to today's offerings, they are a tad slow. Read up on the Vertex, read the reviews on Newegg especially from the Mac owners, and definately pick one up..

Yes you will have to update the firmware the first time, but it increases the speed. Just timemachine your SSD to an external drive, Update the firmware, then TM it back to the SSD. Total process should take like an hour or two..
 
Keep in mind that the Intels are TONS faster than the Vertex drives in terms of random 4K speeds, which are very important.
 
Thanks for the link to your comparison chart.

One of the reasons I want to use SSD instead of an HD is for increased battery life. It looks like the Intel X25-M has the best performance in terms of power consumption. Are those numbers accurate?

Forgive my ignorance, but how much power does a typical hard drive (specifically, the one included with the 13" MacBook aluminum) use?

I was thinking of purchasing a 13" MacBook Pro when Snow Leopard comes out, and then install an SSD. I'm hoping that I can average 7-8 hours on a battery with that combination.
 
I'm looking to getting an intel SSD but I am waiting for a few weeks before Snow leopard comes out so I can install it on there
 
emt1 said:
Keep in mind that the Intels are TONS faster than the Vertex drives in terms of random 4K speeds, which are very important.
Click to expand...

Hence every other SSD manufacturer highlighting their sequential numbers.

I'm sorry but the Vertex cannot hold the Intel SSD's jockstrap. If you daily use is simply copying and moving large file sizes then by all means pay heed to sequential read/write numbers but the vast majority of us are more affected by the Random read/write numbers of which Intel's SSD is King.

We won't even get into the stability problems of OCZ's SSD. Check their forums for that.
 
nuckinfutz said:
Hence every other SSD manufacturer highlighting their sequential numbers.

I'm sorry but the Vertex cannot hold the Intel SSD's jockstrap. If you daily use is simply copying and moving large file sizes then by all means pay heed to sequential read/write numbers but the vast majority of us are more affected by the Random read/write numbers of which Intel's SSD is King.

We won't even get into the stability problems of OCZ's SSD. Check their forums for that.
Click to expand...

The man speaks the truth.

I've used both an OCZ Vertex and an Intel X-25M; the OCZ for about a month, the Intel for several months. My comparison of the two? Anyone who claims that the Vertex is a replacement for the Intel or even a serious competitor is either not very knowledgeable, lying, or both.

The Vertex wins in two areas: sequential speeds and price. Actually, it only wins on price in the US -- UK prices were slightly above prices for the X-25M last time I checked.

Yes, if all you're doing is sequential transfer, than the OCZ Vertex is a great drive. It excels when it comes to sequential throughput... but it's pretty poor at most other things.

Power consumption? Not even close. The Vertex sucks down power compared to the X-25M.

Random reads? Better than a spinning disk, sure, but the Vertex is still something like 10x slower than the X-25M.

Random writes? No stuttering, true, but again: the Vertex is an order of magnitude slower than the Intel drive.

Stability? OCZ has released three versions of the Vertex firmware. The initial version suffered from stuttering. Another version caused data loss (!!). The most recent release seems to work fine for most people. Intel's released one update which corrected a performance decrease encountered under artificial circumstances.

And then there are the other little things... OCZ's updates require the drive to be erased, Intel's leave your data intact. Intel publishes reliability/longevity statistics, how they arrived at those figures, and why they believe the figures to be accurate. OCZ... uh... well the drives should be fine -- don't worry about it. Intel used their several decades of experience to design their own chips from the ground up, their own buffer RAM implementation, etc. OCZ only switched to Indilinx controllers when they caught tremendous flak for the horrid performance of the JMicron controllers.

So yeah, I'm not saying that you should consider the Vertex -- it might be great for what you want -- but just don't listen to anyone who pretends that OCZ's drive is even remotely comparable to Intel's.
 
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