Which ssd

[William7]

so i have decided i want to upgrade my hdd to an ssd and am wondering which brand of ssds i should buy, i was looking at the samsung 830s which claim to have reads of 520mbps and i am more worried about read than write, any recomendations? and are they all roughly the same price for similar specs? or is there a deal out there somewhere?

 

[Spink10]

so i have decided i want to upgrade my hdd to an ssd and am wondering which brand of ssds i should buy, i was looking at the samsung 830s which claim to have reads of 520mbps and i am more worried about read than write, any recomendations? and are they all roughly the same price for similar specs? or is there a deal out there somewhere?

Samsung 830 is an excellent choice - Just purchase from a place where you can return it.

Although many other SSD are also excellent choices.

 

[KylePowers]

What model/year Mac do you have?

 

[FrankHahn]

Samsung, Toshiba, and Intel SSDs which I had experience with are pretty reliable.

 

[Makosuke]

I've been very happy with my OWC; long warranty, good reputation, fast, automatic garbage collection tested to work well on a Mac, and assembled in the US. They certainly did more to follow up on the 6Gbit SATA issues on the 2011 MBPs than any of the other manufacturers.

 

[tmagman]

from what I've read, Intel's still have the lowest failure rate. Even though they're a little more pricey, I've heard of a lot less issues with them in the big picture compared to some of the others.

 

[exposition]

I installed a 128GB OCZ Vertex 2 in my 2009 Macbook Pro about a year ago. Dead simple to install, not a single problem under Snow Leopard or Lion. I recommend it.

 

[William7]

second question

i understand what trim is and the softwares that mark stuff to be deleted instead of actually deleting it cause its better for the drive etc. but how do i tell if the drive has it? or is it something i have to/can put on the drive afterwards?

 

[Spink10]

i understand what trim is and the softwares that mark stuff to be deleted instead of actually deleting it cause its better for the drive etc. but how do i tell if the drive has it? or is it something i have to/can put on the drive afterwards?

TRIM only works on Apple SSDs - However there is a way to enable TRIM on SSDs - with people reporting different results.

 

[holmesf]

I've been very happy with my OWC; long warranty, good reputation, fast, automatic garbage collection tested to work well on a Mac, and assembled in the US. They certainly did more to follow up on the 6Gbit SATA issues on the 2011 MBPs than any of the other manufacturers.

I have two OWC SSDs, and a good friend of mine bought one as well. No problems with any of them, and they work as advertised (in terms of data transfer rate). Good warrantee, good customer support, Mac centric, and a US based company. Highly advised.

 

[Makosuke]

from what I've read, Intel's still have the lowest failure rate. Even though they're a little more pricey, I've heard of a lot less issues with them in the big picture compared to some of the others.

Has Intel worked out the performance problems that digiloyd was seeing?

Mostly, though, I'm curious about how well modern non-OWC SSDs do automatic garbage collection on the MacOS with an HFS volume. A year and a half ago, digiloyd did a very thorough test with several high-end OWC, Crucial, and Intel SSDs, and found that after being filled with a bunch of data and erased a few times, the OWC ran smoothly while the performance on the other brands was completely shot.

Now, that was a full generation of controller ago, so it's quite possible that Intel 510s don't suffer the same problem and that any drive with a SandForce 2K series controller does exactly the same effective HFS garbage collection without the need for TRIM; I have no idea if OWC uses any firmware tweaks or not. It's just that I've never seen a similar test done on current-gen drives; the sites I usually go to for SSD performance tests never seem to do these heavy-use-scenereo tests. Maybe because they're not necessary, I've just never seen any confirmation of that.

 

[Zortrium]

I installed a 128GB OCZ Vertex 2 in my 2009 Macbook Pro about a year ago. Dead simple to install, not a single problem under Snow Leopard or Lion. I recommend it.

+1. I have two Vertex 2 drives, both over a year old and working flawlessly. They're last-gen now, so they're pretty cheap too.

 

[rsm100]

I have two OWC SSDs, and a good friend of mine bought one as well. No problems with any of them, and they work as advertised (in terms of data transfer rate). Good warrantee, good customer support, Mac centric, and a US based company. Highly advised.

Same here. Been using an OWC Extreme Pro 240GB in my MacBook Pro for over a year now. Flawless operation, excellent support including firmware upgrades. Great company.

 

[acesam]

You should go with Samsung, there is a reason why Apple SSD's are all Samsung/Toshiba, check out the review:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4863/the-samsung-ssd-830-review

100% made by Samsung in Korea (not a bad thing at all ) and one of the most reliable drives you can find.

And if you are interested in TRIM there is a new app for Lion called Trim Enabler 2.0
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5453/trim-enabler-20-for-os-x-lion-released

 

[Eddy Munn]

If your computer is SATA 3 buy the OCZ Vertex 3. Otherwise, buy the OCZ Vertex 2. Simple.

 

[kas23]

Go with an OWC. The company is awesome. In fact, I think of them as an Apple that sells only 3rd party parts and peripherals. If that made any sense.

 

[durruti]

Samsung.

random read under 4k file sizes most practical benchmark imo.

for best price, Newegg, eBay, b&h, etc.