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The fastest Solid state for a macbook pro?

Samsung's seem to be one of the faster ones currently available for purchase. The largest I've seen is 256gig versions and since only a few manufacturers are selling them they are charging a fairly steep premium. I think the PM800 by Samsung is selling for $900 to $1000 on ebay, which I think (not 100% sure) is the only place you can purchase them. Newegg has the G.Skill 256gig SSD for $550 range and while several people have had some installation issues the benchmarks looked to be about half the speed of the Samsung.

I don't know all the technical issues, but from reading it would seem some companies are using cheap controllers in their SSD's. I believe Micron ? was one that came up. I'll have to research another thread to be sure of the name. Anyhow there are a few threads here with some good information.

I think by Aug/Sept we will have 512gig SSD versions under $1000 bucks, at which point I'll take the plunge myself. Happy Hunting :)
 
X25-e

FWIW: My 4,1 17" 2.6 MacBook Pro did 220 on XBench (the highest disk test score was 286). I've seen a 2.93 UMBP at 238 with X25-Ms. But I would still recommend the X25-E if you're looking for max performance because:

1. The 2.93 XBench tests I've seen that came in over 220 all have disk numbers that are in excess of the SATA 1.5's (SATA I) 150 MBps speed limit (for example one 2.93 with an X25-M did an uncached read of 256K blocks at 203.85 MB/secs). Unles the UMBP are SATA 3.0 Gbps (SATA II), those tests are using striped raids.

2. Also, the X25-Ms long-term performance has been questioned, but my X25-E has been consistently lightning fast -- I clocked my boot at 23-24 seconds (from power button to desktop). Not only do apps open instantly, they run lightening fast. Which leads me to...

3. IOPS, IOPS, IOPS and write speed.

4. It does not violate Apple's NDA to tell you that the next OS X will be lighter weight than you think and a 32GB boot drive will be more than sufficient (I have two different boot partitions on 1 X25-E); and (b) the speed, at least with the X25-E (which, as I have said, is already stupid fast) is nothing short of astounding...

5. Oh, and BTW, tests with speeds in exces of 600 MBps are using ZFS file systems. I stopped using standard testing methods on ZFS after XBench showed a disk reading 256K blocks, randomly at 2914 MBps.
 
I had an Intel X25-M 80Gb, was damn fast until it failed after 20 days. Intel are going to replace it, but still a bit annoying. I'd probably still buy another one rather than the inferior SSD products on the market...
 
Intel's drives have this problem that makes them severely slow down after a bit - just google for the story, can't remember it offhand
 
raymondu999 said:
Intel's drives have this problem that makes them severely slow down after a bit - just google for the story, can't remember it offhand
Click to expand...

Not based on my experience, however if one can spare the money the X25-E SLC is wicked fast.
 

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Thiol said:
OK, so when the news of this first broke, I defended Intel. I bought the X25-M when it was first released and did not suffer a slow down in speed. After zeroing the hard drive and installing a system, however, it is now much slow in reading than before. I'm attaching my xbench results below. Can others post theirs to compare?
Click to expand...

I'd be very surprised if you were actually seeing the slowing down described by some websites. Do you know what they had to do to the hard disk to make it slow down? In reality you'd unlikely to ever give the disk such a hard time. I think all you're seeing is the difficulty in benchmarking a drive.
 
tibi08 said:
I'd be very surprised if you were actually seeing the slowing down described by some websites. Do you know what they had to do to the hard disk to make it slow down? In reality you'd unlikely to ever give the disk such a hard time. I think all you're seeing is the difficulty in benchmarking a drive.
Click to expand...

I hope you're right. I did just move the drive from a Mac Pro to a MacBook Pro (hence the zeroing and reinstalling).
 
Thiol said:
I hope you're right. I did just move the drive from a Mac Pro to a MacBook Pro (hence the zeroing and reinstalling).
Click to expand...

Nevermind. False alarm. The previous generation MBPs use a SATA I interface, limiting hard drives to ~100 MB / sec read and write times. I previously used this drive in a Mac Pro, which uses a SATA II, and does not limit the Intel X25-M. I used to get > ~ 200 MB / sec read times there. So the SSD has not degraded in quality with my usage...
 
160 x25-M

Thiol said:
OK, so when the news of this first broke, I defended Intel. I bought the X25-M when it was first released and did not suffer a slow down in speed. After zeroing the hard drive and installing a system, however, it is now much slow in reading than before. I'm attaching my xbench results below. Can others post theirs to compare?
Click to expand...

That seems just about on par with what I'm getting on my 160 gig x25-M in my early 2008 MBP (SATA I). I've used it for about 2 months now and have not had any slowdowns. I've noticed it seems to bench a lot higher than the new samsungs when it comes to 4k random writes (which usually seem to be the achilles heel for a lot of ssd's).
 
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