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SSDs: Intel X25-V 40GB or OCZ Vertex 30GB? Or neither?

M

maddin4j

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 28, 2009
96
0
Hello guys!

I've been surfing the web for hours now to find the right SSD for me. I have an ExpressCard SSD which unfortunately is having too many problems so I am planning on buying the MCE OptiBay to replace the SuperDrive with a second hard drive.

So my intention is to buy a cheap/small SSD to install OS X on it and to keep the home folder on the internal drive. There seem to be two SSDs which fit into that category. I need some advice whether those two products even work on my MacBook Pro Early 2008 2,4GHz, or if there are any other incompatibilities & problems. I hope you guys can help me out here :)

So one of the requirements of the MCE OptiBay is "OptiBay Bare Enclosure with SATA Hard Drive Interface requires a 2.5" SATA hard drive 9.5mm or less in height". By the way, I heard that the controller of the SSD is very important. I don't really know much about this so I rely on you guys to help me with the decision.

So the two candidates are Intel X25-V 40GB or OCZ Vertex 30GB.

The OCZ offers less space and costs slightly more but neither of them are really significant as they are in my price range. The OCZ ("Read: Up to 230 MB/s & Write: Up to 135 MB/s") seems to be much faster then the Intel one ("Read: up to 170MB/s & Write: up to 35MB/s"). Especially the writing speed of the Intel X25-V is really poor, even when compared to normal HDDs.

So, I would get the OCZ Vertex 30GB. Would it work well with my MacBook Pro Early 2008 2,4GHz? What about this controller thing? I read that the OCZ uses a Indilinx controller. I have no idea what this means, I just want it to work great on my Mac. And does it even fit the OptiBay? According to Amazon.co.uk the dimensions are "10 x 7 x 0.9 cm"..so this should be fine right? I just want to make sure. Thanks!
 
maddin4j said:
Is there no difference between the X25-V and the X25-M?
Click to expand...

http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/apac/eng/products/nand/feature/index.htm
Picture 4.jpg​

Searching the forum with MRoogle will reveal many threads on this topic:
Best SSD for OS/Apps Drive
 
Okay apparently there is hardly any difference. The Intel one seems to work with less problems but it is slower...which one would you go for?

Btw, how long did it take you to look up that information :confused: Thanks!
 
I have the same laptop as you, and had the same problem with a FileMate 48GB express card. I bought the Intel drive, an Optibay "knockoff" (I'll find the site if you want, it was like half the price), and I love it. It's plenty quick, and I even managed to squeeze a baseline windows XP installation onto it. I keep windows program files on the express card.
 
silencer88 said:
I have the same laptop as you, and had the same problem with a FileMate 48GB express card. I bought the Intel drive, an Optibay "knockoff" (I'll find the site if you want, it was like half the price), and I love it. It's plenty quick, and I even managed to squeeze a baseline windows XP installation onto it. I keep windows program files on the express card.
Click to expand...

Yeah the FileMate was a waste of money...
I just ordered the OptiBay. I think I will go for the OCZ Vertex as there seems to be a Mac Edition. So it should work fine. I'm not 100% sure though. Everyone with the Intel seems to be so happy.
 
I Run an OCZ Vertex .. and I like you was worried about it, and spent a lot of time dithereing between an Intel and the OCZ.

What sold me on the OCZ was the mac edition. It turns out that the OCZ engineers actually went into the lab with apple engineers and came out with a great supported drive.

Like you have pointed out, the Intel has great adoption and probably will work great. I just found more comfort in the fact that the OCZ people considered Macs part of their target user base.
 
maddin4j said:
Btw, how long did it take you to look up that information :confused: Thanks!
Click to expand...

I found the links to threads with MRoogle, in less than 3 seconds, without touching my keyboard. I found the link to the table with Google, in less than 10 seconds, also without touching the keyboard. It took longer to copy and paste into the posts than it took to find the information. Search is your friend!
 
It turns out that the OCZ engineers actually went into the lab with apple engineers and came out with a great supported drive.
Click to expand...

There is no difference at all engineering / firmware wise between the mac edition and the non mac edition. Just clever marketing to target the apple consumer. No Trim support or OCZ providing a wipe utility for this "Mac" SSD.
 
I like OCZ But I hold the Intel drives in higher regard.
From what I can see, write speeds don't mean crap, just the latency and response times.

What are you really going to be writing on a 30GB SSD? I mean I just use firefox, yeah my cookies write to the disk 2x faster but who cares. The Main point of an SSD is the read speed, Read speed dictates how fast your stuff will LOAD, most of the time you're just READING data from the HDD.

Write would affect installing OSX or doing a SSD-SSD file transfer over a SATAII connection. If you have a design/programming/anything big program that likes to write a ton of really small files then yeah the 35mb/s connection might fill up, but that'll probably only happen once over the whole time you use it.

It's like real life, a HDD is a backpack full of messy papers. You need time to search for the paper, pull it out, put it on the table, put the bag down, read it, ect.

The SSD is like having all the papers neatly placed in front of a large table, alphabetized, ect. So all you have to do is pick it up and read.

Writing with a HDD is like searching for a pen, opening the bag, getting the paper, ect ect, writing, ect ect, putting it in the bag, putting the bag down.

Writing with the SSD is like picking the paper up, writing, capping the pen, putting the paper down.

Just like in real life however, do you really write that often?
I live in China and am learning the language, the writing is super hard, but you know what? No one really ever writes anything during the day. Same is true in the US, when do you write? Maby like a few times, sign your name, draw something on a bathroom wall, write down a phone number. That's it.

Yet if you are an author, and hate computers, you write allll the time. So you'd need a super fast SSD with super fast write speeds because you are going to be using it to write 100% for everyday.

Half of me doesn't want to buy the Intel 160GB because it's write speeds aren't over 250MB/s, but the other half knows I'll never ever make use of anything over 30mb/s, and the only thing that matters is the small file writes anyways.
 
Kingcodez said:
I like OCZ But I hold the Intel drives in higher regard.
From what I can see, write speeds don't mean crap, just the latency and response times.

What are you really going to be writing on a 30GB SSD? I mean I just use firefox, yeah my cookies write to the disk 2x faster but who cares. The Main point of an SSD is the read speed, Read speed dictates how fast your stuff will LOAD, most of the time you're just READING data from the HDD.

Write would affect installing OSX or doing a SSD-SSD file transfer over a SATAII connection. If you have a design/programming/anything big program that likes to write a ton of really small files then yeah the 35mb/s connection might fill up, but that'll probably only happen once over the whole time you use it.

It's like real life, a HDD is a backpack full of messy papers. You need time to search for the paper, pull it out, put it on the table, put the bag down, read it, ect.

The SSD is like having all the papers neatly placed in front of a large table, alphabetized, ect. So all you have to do is pick it up and read.

Writing with a HDD is like searching for a pen, opening the bag, getting the paper, ect ect, writing, ect ect, putting it in the bag, putting the bag down.

Writing with the SSD is like picking the paper up, writing, capping the pen, putting the paper down.

Just like in real life however, do you really write that often?
I live in China and am learning the language, the writing is super hard, but you know what? No one really ever writes anything during the day. Same is true in the US, when do you write? Maby like a few times, sign your name, draw something on a bathroom wall, write down a phone number. That's it.

Yet if you are an author, and hate computers, you write allll the time. So you'd need a super fast SSD with super fast write speeds because you are going to be using it to write 100% for everyday.

Half of me doesn't want to buy the Intel 160GB because it's write speeds aren't over 250MB/s, but the other half knows I'll never ever make use of anything over 30mb/s, and the only thing that matters is the small file writes anyways.
Click to expand...

Wow I was literally about to click buy on Amazon to get the OCZ but then I read you post.
I think you are completely right....but: The OCZ reading speed is much faster and the price difference is not big at all! I know that I will feel much more confident if I buy the Intel one but the OCZ seems to give much more than the Intel SSD.

I don't know much yet about the latency and response times of either SSD but I will look into that. Thank you.

dekka007 said:
There is no difference at all engineering / firmware wise between the mac edition and the non mac edition. Just clever marketing to target the apple consumer. No Trim support or OCZ providing a wipe utility for this "Mac" SSD.
Click to expand...

Yeah I would just buy the "normal" version. I heard as well that there is no difference between the Mac edition and the other one.



Guys I will keep researching then. Thanks everyone!
 
Yeah it gives more but what will you use it for?
like I said I never write anything to the drive, and if I do it's at BT or 'normal' downloading speeds. I don't compile programs or edit video or whatever. And unless you do that every minute of the day, you will never notice the difference. When I say every minute I mean every minute. If you might do a video project in the future, then that's not every minute. If you are the 1 in 1000 person that does super intensive stuff then you probably make over 100k/year and should go for an Intel 160 RAID 0 array.
Or a few of those 512gb SSDs.
 
Okay I think I get what you are trying to say. I will go for the Intel X25-V. Thanks for your help. Now I just have to wait for the OptiBay to arrive... :)

I can't wait to finally use a reliable SSD. The FileMate ExpressCard SSD was a waste of £100 and keeps having problems.

Thanks again everyone for helping me here :)
 
maddin4j said:
Okay I think I get what you are trying to say. I will go for the Intel X25-V. Thanks for your help. Now I just have to wait for the OptiBay to arrive... :)

I can't wait to finally use a reliable SSD. The FileMate ExpressCard SSD was a waste of £100 and keeps having problems.

Thanks again everyone for helping me here :)
Click to expand...

http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=51321&vpn=SNV125-S2/30GB&manufacture=Kingston

cheaper and based on the intel chip,

i have tested these...there pretty nice.
 
I did not take the Kingston SSDnw V Series into consideration because they use the JMicron controller which seems to have problems or something. It just doesn't look reliable to me...
 
What do you plan to fit on that 40GB drive? I'm thinking about this and just wondering how large a drive i will need to get. It will be used the same as yours in an optibay(knock-off) with all my data being stored on the hdd. I'm a designer so will have CS4 and quite a lot of other programs installed on this. Do you think i will need a larger drive?

Also kingcodez i hear what you are saying. I just thought that an SSD would make my computer so much faster after thinking about it, all my artwork and stock files will be stored on the internal HDD so will the only benefit of an SSD for designing be in opening up photoshop? What if i used the HDD and the SSD as scratch disks, surely this would help as i only have 4GB of memory so this should speed things up?
 
maddin4j said:
I did not take the Kingston SSDnw V Series into consideration because they use the JMicron controller which seems to have problems or something. It just doesn't look reliable to me...
Click to expand...

Yeah I just read an article on Anandtech abou the Kingston drives sucking compared to the Intel SSD due to the different controllers. It would be wise to go with the Intel out of those two for sure. Now that's just my opinion and there is still the OCZ to decide on too. I think Intel is the way to go for higher random reads and writes which has been described as better real world multitasking. Like the other guy has already said, most people don't just write huge files!
 
Not sure if you're willing to consider, but I use the G.Skill Falcon II ssd drives. Great performance and good on the money.
 
Hmm thanks for the tip. But I am going for the Intel one. Makes me feel safer and I think it's more likely that it will work well. I can't wait :D
 
I wouldn't bother with the slow SSDs like the X25-V. The only reason to use them would be in a HTPC where speedy startup is more important.
 
Well first of all, don't 'settle' for anything but the best unless your budget totally won't allow it. I bought the OCZ and I get terrible XBench speeds, completely horrible, but I can't 'feel' any slowness.

Anyways, if you don't get the best you'll always be left 'wondering' what it would be like.. That's why I'm selling my OCZ and buying the Intel.

40GB isn't a lot.
I'm using 25gb without data, with my 8 gigs of music/ictures I still have little room.

Sure you can squeeze photoshop on there but you might have to make a 'second applications folder' for those other big apps on your HDD.

That defeats the whole purpose of an SSD.

If you can go with a bigger drive. I thought 60gb was small...
Also read up on the Vertex's their awesome if you can't afford an Intel..
 
Thanks! Well the Intel was actually cheaper. I will get it this week. I still have to wait for the OptiBay. Can't wait!
 
Kingcodez said:
40GB isn't a lot.
I'm using 25gb without data, with my 8 gigs of music/ictures I still have little room.

Sure you can squeeze photoshop on there but you might have to make a 'second applications folder' for those other big apps on your HDD.

That defeats the whole purpose of an SSD.
Click to expand...

"squeeze" Photoshop, lol. Photoshop requires 1GB of disk space to install.

40GB SSD will fit (for example):

15Gb Windows 7
1.5GB Office 2007
9GB Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium (Includes:
* Dreamweaver CS4
* Flash CS4 Professional
* Photoshop CS4 Extended
* Illustrator CS4
* Fireworks CS4
* Acrobat 9 Pro
* Soundbooth CS4
* Contribute CS4
* Adobe Bridge CS4
* Adobe Device Central CS4
* Version Cue CS4)

8.5GB Miscellaneuos applications/(temp)files
6GB Empty for optimal performance
-------------
TOTAL 40GB

Seems like you can still fit a reasonable nunmber of application on a drive that size. Of course, if your storing data on a SSD (like music and pictures) then you will never be satisfied. I have 1.5TB of data on my PC, given the current price/GB, what use is SSD technology for dealing with that? 40GB + 2/3 storage drives (RAID 1/5) is extremely suitable for many people on a budget imho.
 
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