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To get 128GB Solid State Drive or Not?

sgtCaspian said:
Just for the record, SSD is NOT new technology. However, you are correct that they are beginning to become practical enough for mainstream use, and that prices are going down.

My plan is to buy a new MBP (whenever it's released) with a high capacity HDD. Then, when SDDs are more affordable/reliable, I'll use an OptiBay or something similar to set up a hybrid situation, using the SSD for applications and the HDD for mobile file storage.

As a frequent Logic/Pro Tools user, I can't wait to enjoy the benefits of larger SSDs a few years down the road, but right now I'm doing my best to transition smoothly without maxing out the credit card.

(ps, hello MacRumors world!)
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Well, I just noticed this was your first post. Welcome here! :)

You're doing a smart thing. I actually already have the OptiBay adapter waiting here for an SSD, but I'm in no hurry to use it. I saw the 512GB SSD's on NewEgg and I sure look forward to putting one of those in my machine some time down the road. The prices are pretty outrageous right now though.
 
I-Eat-Flowers said:
Is it possible to put both, a normal hard drive AND a SSD into a macbook pro at the same time?
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Absolutely. People take out their SuperDrives and put in an HD adapter. Some even build RAID 0 systems this way. You just need to search the forums to find those discussions.
 
esmode said:
Get an Intel or OCZ. You'll save money and you will get a better drive. My only gripe with an SSD is the capacity. I honestly enjoy the capacity of a 1tb drive over the speed increase of an SSD. Being able to travel without external hds while keeping large library of files with you is nice.
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This is the only point that matters when choosing if you already have the available cash.

Space versus Speed.

To me the space when traveling far outweighs the speed enhancement at this point in time. Now if you don't mind carrying an external portable HDD or you are going to use something like an Optibay then you could go either way in my book.
 
but really, what do you carry around you that you need 500GB or 1TB?.... all your movies, music, photos? for what?....
 
yourtoys7 said:
but really, what do you carry around you that you need 500GB or 1TB?.... all your movies, music, photos? for what?....
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Some people actually do that use the laptop as their main computer now-a-days. If you have something at home then by all means get the SSD. That's what I'm actually researching now since I use a WD 500GB Passport for backup and storage for my notebook. I carry it to school to work on my Ubuntu image for my Linux Server class. The SSD for my main applications and OS would probably help me out in the IT field. We are setting up a help desk at work and having a snappier functioning system for help over the phone and calls when I have to go to a different department to help some one and show them something might be even more helpful.
 
yourtoys7 said:
but really, what do you carry around you that you need 500GB or 1TB?.... all your movies, music, photos? for what?....
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My iTunes library with my music on it is 780GB right now. The 1TB WD Passport is really good to have right now.
 
My two cents on the SSD questions:
I used a BlackBook for about a year, had the 250GB WD HDD, Seemed pretty good, sometimes it'd slow down maby stall, not too noticeable.

Anyways I bought a new MBP maby a year ago, along with it I tried to figure out which SSD to buy, so I laid down my $220 and went with an OCZ Vertex 60GB, simply because the Intel G2 just came out and was hard to get/broken at the time.

I also went and bought an OptiBay drive bay adapter, and stuffed in a 500GB WD HDD in there.

Anyways, I don't notice the speed anymore, simply because I have gotten used to having 13 programs open within 20 seconds and be usable on boot. I've gotten used to instant this, and instant that. It may not be the fastest drive, but it's all I know and I know it's the best thing ever.

My VMs suspend, reboot, shutdown, in seconds rather than minutes. I had a problem with bootcamp and couldn't make it work at the time, but in a VM the machines were snappy.

My HDD though, the spinner, must've gotten bumped too much because it just died, I suspect that not being in the traditional HDD location, made it prone to take %5 more damage when it got bumped.

My plans now are to:
Sell the vertex, upgrade to a 160GB Intel G2 SSD.
Replace the 500GB WD drive under warranty, sell that, and upgrade to a 1TB drive.

I plan to put the 3 platter, 1TB drive in the normal HDD spot, and place the SSD into the Optibay. Hopefully this will help avoid shocks and bumps.

However, when I get a new computer this summer I will probably sell the optibay with the MBP. I will just use the 160GB drive as my main drive, right now I'm only using a 60gb drive and I have room (but no movies), Between my girlfriend's MBP with her big HDD, and an external 3.5" Firewire drive, I don't think I need a second internal disk anymore. It's cool to have 8 million movies with you at all times, but you can do the same with a good external drive, and if you can up the size, go with a 3.5 inch drive and get a 2TB disk. That will keep your 160GB HDD backed up for a long time, and every movie you have. Better yet get a NAS and a really good router.

I don't plan to be blown away by the Intel SSD, I just want to get rid of my Vertex before the price drops, this way I only have to spend $30 to get an Intel SSD which will hold it's resale value for longer than the Vertex. So when the G3 SSDs come out, I won't have to pay as much to upgrade.

Also on the Apple warranty crap:
If you are a capable techy, and are comfortable opening up your computer and messing with stuff, then get your favorite SSD. But Apple liked to fork people, they use the old Samsung SSD's, that have the old problems and such. Just buy your own SSD, for $180 on newegg (vertex 60gb) and buy the Macbook with the smallest HDD.

When something goes wrong, open the computer up, install the old HDD, and mail it to whoever to fix it. However nothing will go wrong, yes you have peace of mind but I'd rather buy a faster SSD for my $400 than a warranty. I sell my laptop every year and buy a new one, I pay 1-200 dollars to do this, but I stay current. 1-200 dollars a year is my 'warranty' it's like leasing a car. Every year you get a new one. Every year the warranty is new so if there's a problem you can deal with it. Just yank the HDD and the memory, and move on to the next computer.
 
The reason I like Apples OEM SSD is because I don't have to dig and find drivers for the SSD drive. I have heard with OCZ SSDs and others, that you have to install the proper drivers etc.
 
I just bought an 80GB X25M and couldn't be happier. I thought about getting a non-Intel, but from what I've read they just aren't as resilient. As I'm using OS X (with no Trim), thats kind of important to me. Booting takes 1/4 of the time and Chrome opens in the blink of an eye....

I think my next tower is going to have 2 or 4 of these things :D
 
thanks to all, seems like ton of options for me, but seem that it does make more sense to get your own and install. I guess we'll see what comes out soon and what options we'll have.
 
mike8717189 said:
Do we really need all this 500GB or 1TB when we travel? or you just like having your own Blockbuster everywhere you go?
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Personally, I tend to keep whatever media it is I'm listening to / watching while traveling resident on my iPod. That's just me.

Others want a complete desktop replacement. For big storage, I use a storage server ;)
 
Glad to have seen this thread, looking into a 128GB SSD option, reasoning in my sig. Some quite useful info, cheers guys.

Did PM'd another user as I'd seen they had a Kinsgton V+ series, as the advised speeds look good and the price not as expensive as some others, and they gave a favourable report of it and seemed happy with it.

thatguysmells said:
The reason I like Apples OEM SSD is because I don't have to dig and find drivers for the SSD drive. I have heard with OCZ SSDs and others, that you have to install the proper drivers etc.
Click to expand...

Am I missing something here, but surely that'd be a catch 22 situation? If you can't use the drive until you install the drivers, then surely you'd need the drive to be working in order to install drivers on it? And so on.
 
thatguysmells said:
The reason I like Apples OEM SSD is because I don't have to dig and find drivers for the SSD drive. I have heard with OCZ SSDs and others, that you have to install the proper drivers etc.
Click to expand...

No such thing. It's like trying to find drivers for hard drives, it just doesn't happen. The SSD drives use a normal sata or pata interface. The Mac just sees it like a normal hard drive, but faster.
 
thatguysmells said:
The reason I like Apples OEM SSD is because I don't have to dig and find drivers for the SSD drive. I have heard with OCZ SSDs and others, that you have to install the proper drivers etc.
Click to expand...

So in other words you went with the more expensive and slower option just because you didn't know better...

This is totally made up and others considering an SSD should disregard the quoted post.

From my research in shopping for an SSD:

When looking at an SSD the architecture (single level cell vs multi-level cell), the buffer/cache, and the controller are all major considerations.

I think SLC is supposed to be the "best" but the MLC drives are outstanding if you get the other stuff right (controller, cache).

From what I've seen 64MB cache seems to net reviews with no "studdering" with the proper controller.

For controllers -The older JMicron controller had "studdering" issues and should be avoided (from what I read), the newer controllers that do RAID0 behind the scenes are great at sustained transfers but seem to be crap for Random read/write. The Indilinx Barefoot IDX22 seems to be the choice for all the "extreme" versions from each manufacturer - no RAID0 under the covers, huge read/write, and no reported studdering

It appears that one should find the cheapest SSD that contains 64MB cache, Indilinx Barefoot IDX22, and MLC (to stay cheap and still get decent size).

I'm just regurgitating what I've read on the web, but I've read it over and over from different sources, so I feel that I have a pretty good idea of what I want. I'm probably going to get the Crucial CT128M225

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148319&Tpk=Crucial CT128M225

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=351&Itemid=60

Good Luck.
 
mike8717189 said:
Do we really need all this 500GB or 1TB when we travel? or you just like having your own Blockbuster everywhere you go?
Click to expand...

We don't all have the same needs so that is going to very by person. I travel for months at a time outside of the country, mostly Japan. So space is at a premium and packing light is challenging. Small things add up so carrying around external hds and dvds is a waste when it all can fit in a 500 to 1tb internal hd. I already keep one hd in my bag for backup purposes. I'm also running VMs and have to work with VM images which are bigger than some hard drives.
 
I don't know exactly which model of samsung SSD apple is currently using but if they are using the pm800 it does not "suck" like everyone think it does. In fact the latest ones come with updated firmware that support trim as this is the exact same 256gb SSD I got with my Dell laptop I recently returned.

Rated at 220MB/s read and 200MB/s write.

If you compare that to the intel X25-M (160gb) which reads up to 250MB/s but writes only 100MB/s.... It only can write up to half of the speed the samsungs can...

This is assuming they are the pm800's. If they are not ignore this?
 
The general consensus here clearly seems to be that the Samsung SSD's "suck." Could someone elaborate? Is it a performance issue or a reliability issue?
 
Hi guys

First time post, have been lurking for a while as I'm in the market for the new Mac Pro when it eventually refreshes this year.

I've also been looking into SSDs and I would recommend the following articles:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738

http://anandtech.com/show/2829

It seems there is a lot more to SSDs than just basic read / write speeds and I'd recommend anyone thinking of getting one to do the research first to make sure they get the best value out of their purchase.

Hope that helps :)

Fletch
 
This thread's getting me excited about optibaying! So nice to have the option to use the SSD for speed and still have a storage drive in one small neat laptop. Hope the new macbooks can still be modded like this!
 
Does anybody have a Crucial SSD yet? I was thinking about getting the 128GB one. I was going to put everything on the SSD except Movies and TV Shows, which would be put on my Mybook Passport.
 
Fry-man22 said:
So in other words you went with the more expensive and slower option just because you didn't know better...

This is totally made up and others considering an SSD should disregard the quoted post.

From my research in shopping for an SSD:

When looking at an SSD the architecture (single level cell vs multi-level cell), the buffer/cache, and the controller are all major considerations.

I think SLC is supposed to be the "best" but the MLC drives are outstanding if you get the other stuff right (controller, cache).

From what I've seen 64MB cache seems to net reviews with no "studdering" with the proper controller.

For controllers -The older JMicron controller had "studdering" issues and should be avoided (from what I read), the newer controllers that do RAID0 behind the scenes are great at sustained transfers but seem to be crap for Random read/write. The Indilinx Barefoot IDX22 seems to be the choice for all the "extreme" versions from each manufacturer - no RAID0 under the covers, huge read/write, and no reported studdering

It appears that one should find the cheapest SSD that contains 64MB cache, Indilinx Barefoot IDX22, and MLC (to stay cheap and still get decent size).

I'm just regurgitating what I've read on the web, but I've read it over and over from different sources, so I feel that I have a pretty good idea of what I want. I'm probably going to get the Crucial CT128M225

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148319&Tpk=Crucial CT128M225

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=351&Itemid=60

Good Luck.
Click to expand...

Patdt13 said:
Does anybody have a Crucial SSD yet? I was thinking about getting the 128GB one. I was going to put everything on the SSD except Movies and TV Shows, which would be put on my Mybook Passport.
Click to expand...

I'm in the same boat trying to decide between the crucial and Kingston V series (64Gb) version as cost is a factor (for my netbook) = I don't think I want to spend $300+ for an upgrade that would cost more than the netbook itself if I had to replace it... for my whitebook, I'd get the crucial 128Gb unit or wait until the intel 160Gb unit comes down in price... decisions, decisions...
 
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