Does anyone here use a velociraptor as a boot drive? Have you noticed a big difference in boot time compared to a standard 7200 rpm drive? I have been thinking about getting one of these instead of a SSD because I heard SSDs speed will deminish after time. Also, does anyone use a 15,000 rpm drive as their boot drive? Do you use bootcamp with these fast drives or use a seperate drive? Thanks in advance for the insight!
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Velociraptor as boot drive
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Yes - I've used one for years - noisy and not all that fast and increased vibration. I am now using a Samsung F3 1 TB - all my apps and OS X barely touch 20 GB - so the outer tracks (very fast) handle all of them.
Sleep you MP and boot times are not an issue.
Sleep you MP and boot times are not an issue.
No - not that I noticed - cost $85 or so, and dont have any of the write speed degradation of ssd technology.
Well right now I have a few options for my MP boot drive. I could either go with the standard drive which will be 7200 rpms, go with a velociraptor/cheetah for faster writes and reads that the standard, or go with a SSD. The thing that turns me off about the SSD is that it will lose quality over time. And people have said that in order to get it back to full quality, you will have to wipe everything off the drive and I shouldn't have to do anything for the drive to work the way its supposed to.
Latest SSD's don't "lose quality" over time. There are plenty of threads indicating such.
cheers
JohnG
I would strongly suggest you do your own research on SSDs before pulling the trigger. There are a lot of crap SSDs and there are good ones, there isn't much midground. Stick with OCZ Vertex drives on a budget.
As you normally would. Put in your Snow Leopard DVD and install it as usual. When done, you need to move your home folder to another hard disk, because you only want the OS and your apps on the SSD. Follow this guide to do so:
http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-move-the-home-folder-in-os-x-and-why/
Hello,
If you're on a Mac Pro, thinking about SSDs and 15K hard drives, be prepared to spend some money. If you need the speed, don't buy the cheapest member of a high quality category.
IMO, if you need real speed for your OS, hard drives, regardless of their speed, are obsolete. Many many people on these boards (including myself) have been using SSDs, and everything is fine.
Also, as someone else posted, boot times are meaningless: either leave your mac running awake 24/7 (like I do), or put it to sleep when you don't need it.
The same goes for app loading times. RAM is so cheap these days, and Mac OS X so efficient with it, that you don't need to close your apps as soon as you're done every time. Boot time and app loading time are irrelevant "benchmarks" or values these days.
If you're thinking about speed, regardless of the applications you use, the first thing to check is your processor speed. Then you go on to the RAM, and make sure you have enough. The rest of the upgrades offer only minimal gains compared to those first 2.
A SSD (or 15k drive) will NOT make your apps go faster in almost every case. Before buying a SSD for performance reasons, make sure that it will help your apps.
Loa
I've been reading many of the threads on SSDs, and remain confused about their real-world value for my particular situation (which likely differs from other users). I'm planning on getting a new 2010 MP whenever it's released, with a fast processor ... probably a 3.33GHz Hex core. I'll load it up with (3rd-party) RAM.
In use, I'll keep my primary apps open most of the time and will sleep the machine when not in use. Apps will be mostly Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and a couple of others from FCS and CS5 depending on the project.
Since I won't be rebooting or launching apps except rarely, how/where exactly will any speed boost from a SSD for the OS/apps be noticeable? Would the money I could spend on a decent SSD be better spent elsewhere on my system?
This article is a good place to start reading. It can answer a lot of your questions.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829
The SSD advantage doesn't only come from the loading of apps, but the constant read/write of the thousands of small files in the system. The OS folders have nearly 100,000 files (combined) in them, each seek for those tiny files takes a minimum of 5.00ms for a fast hard drive to access while an SSD takes only 0.01ms. Same effect when browsing in the finder or popup file windows, even more so if you have "calculate all sizes" enabled in the view options.
If you're not planning to upgrade your processor (or if you're planning to buy your SSD with your next MP purchase), and are planning to get all the RAM you need, then a SSD won't help you much in your apps.
It *will* make your overall system quicker (in terms of response time and overall snappyness). But that "quickness" won't transform into productivity gain in your apps.
On the other hand, I would *never* go back to using a regular HD as my boot volume. The Finder is so snappy it's scary! But my Photoshop experience hasn't changed at all.
Demonstrations like these are amusing, but as one of the commenters on youtube said: "There we have it folks, if you want to open 51 programs simultanious SSD hdd's is clearly the way to go!"
And if you're not planning on opening 10+ apps at the same time, and sleep your mac instead of shutting it off, SSDs won't bring a huge speed difference "in your apps".
Loa
They're not expensive if:
-You're only planning to get your OS (without the Users) on it
And
-You have a Mac Pro.
60GB - 80GB should be more than enough for nearly all systems, and having 4-6 slots to mount your drives in a Mac Pro means that you have plenty of room.
Loa
I spent several years with 10K and 15K SCSI drives in a non-Mac server that I was using as if it were a single-user machine (it's not important why, but there were many I/O processes, barcode scanners, timers, etc. all coming in and all wanting to read/write small files, with the occasional large file that needed to be read, updated, and written out again as quickly as possible). Under those conditions, the 10K and 15K drives paid off and the difference between them and the 7200 SCSI drives was considerable.
If you're doing something analogous to that then the SSD will probably work well for you. But if not, I doubt a faster ordinary drive will make your working life any better. You should be fine with a 7200.
It's easy to get into a faster-faster-faster obsession. I'm no different. I'm not in the business I used the old server for, so I'm not worried about high-speed response any more. I did think about a faster system drive for my Mac Pro because hey! faster is better. But then I stopped and considered what I was doing with it, and realized that although it would be pretty freaking cool, it wouldn't make what I do all day go any faster.
I'd just be cooler . . . and a lot poorer.
If you're doing something analogous to that then the SSD will probably work well for you. But if not, I doubt a faster ordinary drive will make your working life any better. You should be fine with a 7200.
It's easy to get into a faster-faster-faster obsession. I'm no different. I'm not in the business I used the old server for, so I'm not worried about high-speed response any more. I did think about a faster system drive for my Mac Pro because hey! faster is better. But then I stopped and considered what I was doing with it, and realized that although it would be pretty freaking cool, it wouldn't make what I do all day go any faster.
I'd just be cooler . . . and a lot poorer.