Feeling the Itch (SSD drives)
I’ve been lusting after SSD drives for a few months now. The performance and durability of these drives are the tempting factors. What’s holding me back is primarily the cost (and the lack of TRIM tools for Mac OS X). The dollar / megabyte ratio is still pretty high compared to the standard hard drive.
If I owned one, I would use an SSD drive as my boot drive on my Mac Pro. This drive would also house all the applications I use on a regular basis. My plan would still include using platter-based 7200RPM drives as a scratch disk / data drive.
I’m looking for your input on SSD drives. Do you have one? Are you planning to get one soon, or do you plan on waiting? If you’re have one / own one, which model do you recommend? Any drawbacks? Are TRIM tools necessary for “self-healing” drives? Should I wait? Any word on the new low cost Intel 40GB “value” SSD drives? Do SSD drives get fragmented? Will defragmentation utilities work well with them?
I’m looking for more data points from other readers. Let me know in the comments below.
–Krishna
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Tell me what you think!
Rob Stenzinger
April 26, 2010 at 12:21 amAnything that’s heavy disk i/o is noticeably faster: boot, app launch, installs, file copy, exporting stuff from Garageband and Illustrator, etc.
I use an Intel 80 gig SSD “SSDSA2MH080G1GC” in my Modbook. I’ve never defragged as it’s my understanding that’s not good for SSD’s since it really isn’t needed for boosting performance yet it chips away at the finite read-write life of the drive. It’s been a great upgrade for one machine, but I’m waiting for prices to drop more before considering it for my other workstation.
Stephen
April 26, 2010 at 3:50 amI picked one up for my desktop. Intel 128gig. Installed Win7 fresh. I’m using it purely as a gaming drive and I’ve noticed significant differences in games like The Sims 3. I rarely see the cities being drawn when I follow my sim when driving around town anymore.
Price per gig comparing HDD to SSD is definately a major consideration. How often are you going to be reaching for your coffee vs doing actual productivity?
Personally, I don’t think I jumped the gun on buying my SSD as I noticed a SIGNIFICANT change in game speeds with no other changes than OS. However, if you’re going to be just using a machine in a desktop, and you’re just playing with imagery/comics/word processing? I’d find it hard to justify.
Matthijs van der Vleuten
April 26, 2010 at 4:31 amFragmentation is only a problem for normal hard disks. When a file is fragmented, parts of it are stored on different locations (possibly far away) instead of all together (sequentially). It takes time for the disk heads to move, which is why fragmentation is noticeable on hard disks.
For SSDs, there are no moving parts. Most SSDs read data spread around as well as data stored sequentially, so as far as the SSD is concerned, fragmentation is not a problem. Defragmenting it only wastes time as well as valuable writes. While most SSDs survive millions of writes each to the same location, it’s not a good idea to waste writes.
There might perhaps be some overhead on the filesystem to track the different parts of fragmented files, but that likely is not a problem at all unless it’s quite heavily fragmented.
MiniMe
April 26, 2010 at 5:19 amI’m using one of those 40GB “value” drives and I like it a lot. The read throughout is almost as good as with the bigger drives (though max write-throughput is significantly lower). Ubuntu boots in 5 seconds and all applications start very fast. I really don’t miss my old HDD ;)
Of course there is fragmentation with SSDs too (even more becasue of the wear leveling), but it’s not an issue because of the very low access time and latency. Defragmenting a SSD is totally useless and would only shorten its lifetime and degrade performance.
The TRIM command helps keeping the performance at a higher level, but does not (necc.) increase the SSDs lifetime. If you don’t fill up the SSD completely and avoid unnecessary write operations (e.g. mount with noatime, use tmpfs) you will have a lot of fun with your SSD ;)
Krishna
April 26, 2010 at 1:56 pmthanks, gentlemen. I plan on waiting for at least a few more months (saving up) before I plunk down cash for a new SSD drive. One of the things I’ll also have to buy is a 2.5″ to 3.5″ drive bay to actually house the drive inside the case.
It’s good to know that SSD drives don’t suffer from fragmentation, at least not the way it happens to normal platter based drives. I’ll continue to keep my eye out on any new developments.
eidolon
April 29, 2010 at 1:20 pmI have the Intel SSDSA2M160G2GC 160GB in my 27″ 2.8GHz iMac i7. Boot time is 17 seconds…. This was the best rated SSD at the time I bought it and has all the TRIM and maintenance functions built in. It’s my boot disk and generally has a 100GB free for working space. I have a 4TB WD ShareSpace connected via GigaBit Ethernet for scratch/permanent storage. Very happy with the switch to SSD…
Looks like the new king is the OWC model. Not bad prices for the 100GB model. The 200GB still
eidolon
April 29, 2010 at 1:25 pmand the rest of the post… You really need a Preview and edit function on this site.
The 200 GB still a bit pricey. Check out diglloyd for reviews of both. http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-SSD-OWC-Mercury_Extreme.html
krishna
May 1, 2010 at 9:05 amThanks, eidolon. I’m looking into a method to add preview and edit buttons for comment posters. (If anyone has any suggestions, please share your ideas.) The OWC Mercury Extreme SSD is something I would love to be able to test…