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any downside to Mercury Accelsior SSD as boot drive?

M

malch

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 20, 2008
466
9
Hi there,
Aside from the expense, is there any downside to the Mercury Accelsior SSD?
I have a 2010 6-core Mac Pro with lots of RAM, but my boot drive is a standard 7200rpm SATA drive. I've been reading on this forum about speeding things up by using an SSD drive as the boot drive.
My MP is only 3G-capable, from what I gather, so 6G would be wasted. But this Accelsior, by installing via PCIe, seems to circumvent 3G and even 6G limitations.
If I save up my Christmas money, would the 480GB Accelsior be a good investment, do you think? Are there any downsides to going this way?
I seem to have at least two free PCIe slots on the back of my MP (does it take one, or two slots)?).
Would booting up be exactly like booting up now (just click the power button), but faster? Or is it somehow more involved?
Thanks for any advice,
malch
 
I've seen absolutely no downsides, had mine for about 6 months. Aside from the price obviously. I feel it was warranted as this is my work machine so a minute saved is usually a dollar earned.
 
Jordan, thanks for the speedy reply.
So, just so I understand (I'm not technically-minded), this drive shows up on your desktop as your hard drive (boot drive), and is just like a standard boot drive... except faster (at booting up, etc.).
Is that right? You don't have to 'flash' anything or start up holding down the 'C' key or whatever. It's just like normal, except faster?
thanks,
malch
 
It behaves exactly like your current boot drive. No fuss and no hiccups with installation either. It is seriously fast for things like video editing, but the speedup is not really noticeable for most things compared to a normal SSD on a 3G SATA port. I have no regrets, though.

If you want even more speed, get two and RAID them in a striped configuration. But that really is overkill.

Btw, it needs only one slot.
 
malch said:
Jordan, thanks for the speedy reply.
So, just so I understand (I'm not technically-minded), this drive shows up on your desktop as your hard drive (boot drive), and is just like a standard boot drive... except faster (at booting up, etc.).
Is that right? You don't have to 'flash' anything or start up holding down the 'C' key or whatever. It's just like normal, except faster?
thanks,
malch
Click to expand...

Please! Please! Don't pay more for the same technology, buy this http://www.apricorn.com/vel-solox2.html and a SSD that you prefer and thats it. You have SATA 3 via PCI-E, a spare sata port too, meaning if you wanted you could have 2 SSD's on one card, you can use any SSD you like. It's bootable too.

Don't pay more than you need to, OWC are only used by those who don't know of alternatives, often don't know that they're being charged through the nose either.
 
i was looking at the owc offering for a long time but the $300 for a 128gb was tough to swallow...i've ordered one of the apricorn velocity x2 cards from amazon ($79 after $20 mail in rebate) plus returns open until end of january 2013. i think this is a better pill to swallow since you can use an SSD you already have. I'd love the OWC offering so see the amazing speed difference but for now this $79 card should hopefully do the same but not as fast.
 
pyzon said:
i was looking at the owc offering for a long time but the $300 for a 128gb was tough to swallow...i've ordered one of the apricorn velocity x2 cards from amazon ($79 after $20 mail in rebate) plus returns open until end of january 2013. i think this is a better pill to swallow since you can use an SSD you already have. I'd love the OWC offering so see the amazing speed difference but for now this $79 card should hopefully do the same but not as fast.
Click to expand...

I haven't got US pricing of the OWC offering to hand but am I right in saying that two velocity x2's would still be less than the OWC card?
 
malch said:
Hi there,
Aside from the expense, is there any downside to the Mercury Accelsior SSD?
I have a 2010 6-core Mac Pro with lots of RAM, but my boot drive is a standard 7200rpm SATA drive. I've been reading on this forum about speeding things up by using an SSD drive as the boot drive.
Click to expand...

If you are upgraded to 10.8.2, you can the various threads here about Fusion drives. Buy a 128 GB SSD or 256 GB SSD drive, make a backup of everything you have, and create a single drive that is SSD + hard drive combined. No messing around with putting the right files on the right drive, and it takes full advantage of all the space on the SSD.
 
All Taken said:
I haven't got US pricing of the OWC offering to hand but am I right in saying that two velocity x2's would still be less than the OWC card?
Click to expand...

well currently you can get 2 velocity x2's for $160 from amazon (rebate is only for amazon) otherwise they are $99 each.

The base 128GB OWC PICe SSD is approx $300.

But the OWC is profoundly faster - I can't attest to that as i don't have one, i'm just buying supplies for an upcoming Mac Pro purchase.

It, like the Velocity, is/will be upgradeable if you buy the base you can then (not sure if now) buy higher capacity blades to insert into the controller, similar to the velocity you can just upgrade the ssd.

Of course isn't the OWC running raid as there are two SSD blades, so if you hooked a 2nd SSD to the velocity card (as it takes two) then you may have comparable speeds.

OWC option is probably a neater fit, but who cares if the door is closed...
 
On a different website, someone posted some numbers for his/her 2010 3.33 Hex (which happens to be my computer) with the 480GB Accelsior...

WRITE: 525.7 MB/s ; READ: 662 MB/s
The dials are basically pegged out. I'm very satisfied! :D


A familiar name (Derbothaus) from the MacRumours forums then weighed in:

A Crucial M4 on a 3G link is a faster boot disk honestly hopefully you are using for huge media streams or space saving:D

Derbothaus, if you happen across this (or someone else, if you know what D. was getting at)—can you elaborate please?
Thanks,
malch
 
From what I gather, the Accelsior has two SSD 'blades' (for the 480GB version, each blade would be 240GB), which presumably could be replaced by bigger blades in the future, when prices drop.
The Apricorn accepts any SSD drive, which means that in the future, if you add a larger SSD, you could use the original in something else.
re which one is advantageous... a question: are the Accelsior's SSD 'blades' useable in anything else? Or are they proprietary things that don't fit into anything else?
I've been doing a bit more research... and yes, it certainly seems like the OWC option is more expensive (by a couple hundred bucks, anyway, for approx. 500GB of flash memory). But maybe they boot more reliably, without any fussing?
Regards,
malch
 
malch said:
From what I gather, the Accelsior has two SSD 'blades' (for the 480GB version, each blade would be 240GB), which presumably could be replaced by bigger blades in the future, when prices drop.
The Apricorn accepts any SSD drive, which means that in the future, if you add a larger SSD, you could use the original in something else.
re which one is advantageous... a question: are the Accelsior's SSD 'blades' useable in anything else? Or are they proprietary things that don't fit into anything else?
I've been doing a bit more research... and yes, it certainly seems like the OWC option is more expensive (by a couple hundred bucks, anyway, for approx. 500GB of flash memory). But maybe they boot more reliably, without any fussing?
Regards,
malch
Click to expand...

I believe you can get a proprietary "blade" enclosure from OWC.
 
There was a review of the 960 GB Accelsior board recently which pointed out that the two blades were actually configured as a RAID-0 to increase transfer speed considerably.

Does anyone know if all 4 of the models are also configured as a RAID-0 array?

Are there any issues with creating a bootable Windows partition (BootCamp) on the Accelsior along with OS X?
 
I'm pretty sure they are all configured as raid. That's why the advertised speeds are quite fast.

I got one of the 240GB OCZ RevoDrive x2 units (Sil 3124 controller) but could never get it working in OSX. With one set of third party drivers it showed up each of the four 60GB partitions on the desktop but after that the machine wouldn't boot correctly.
Unfortunate because in Windows it gets over 650-700MB/s quite easily.

So don't bother going down the OCZ road for OSX.

I was never aware of the Apricorn unit, it looks like good value. Using two drives attached in raid would definitely be the go.
 
Velocity Solo x2 & Bootcamp problems

I've been wanting to get 2 Velocity Solo x2's. One for OSX and one for Bootcamp. I asked Apricorn about this and apparently they have been having some problems with Bootcamp. Here's my question and their answer.


Question: Velocity Solo x2

When installed in a Mac Pro 5,1 (2010) will this boot into Mac OS X 10.8.2 as well as a Bootcamp volume with Win 7 x64 ?

Thanks, Dave


Answer:
"Tough question. The answer is that it should boot, but we are currently working with an issue that we are having with Bootcamp. I hope to have an update shortly.

Thank you,

Kurt"
 
DJenkins said:
I'm pretty sure they are all configured as raid. That's why the advertised speeds are quite fast.

I got one of the 240GB OCZ RevoDrive x2 units (Sil 3124 controller) but could never get it working in OSX. With one set of third party drivers it showed up each of the four 60GB partitions on the desktop but after that the machine wouldn't boot correctly.
Unfortunate because in Windows it gets over 650-700MB/s quite easily.

So don't bother going down the OCZ road for OSX.

I was never aware of the Apricorn unit, it looks like good value. Using two drives attached in raid would definitely be the go.
Click to expand...

What do you mean don't bother going down the ocz road for osx????? I have two OCZ Vertex 4 installed on a apricorn velocity solo x2 in raid 0. It boots, trim works and speeds are ~700mb/s writes - ~600mb/s reads. I would take that any day over OWC.
 
beto2k7 said:
What do you mean don't bother going down the ocz road for osx????? I have two OCZ Vertex 4 installed on a apricorn velocity solo x2 in raid 0. It boots, trim works and speeds are ~700mb/s writes - ~600mb/s reads. I would take that any day over OWC.
Click to expand...

Sorry should have been more specific, I was talking about the OCZ RevoDrive PCIe cards.

I have two OCZ Agility 3 SSDs working perfectly in OSX as well :)
 
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