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Bad idea to boot from an SSD via FW800?

nightfly13

nightfly13

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 17, 2008
679
0
Ranchi, India
So I'm planning to upgrade (crossgrade?) from 1,1 Mac Pro to the entry 27" iMac. I'm selling the Mac Pro without my 80GB Intel SSD. I'm not really up for paying $600 for the SSD addition (although, by Apple BTO standards, 25% above market price is reasonable) as it's just beyond my budget.

I'm going between trying to bracket mount (after finding a bracket..??) the 2.5" internally on my own, putting it into the optical bay (as I've done on my uMBP) or thinking to maybe try to boot from a FW800 enclosure? I'd use a TB enclosure if they were out - does this make any sense, performance-wise?

I have the SSD for OS app snappiness, don't actually 'need' it but have grown accustomed to it, hard to go back to HDD for OS/Apps.
 
I'm gonna keep an eye on this thread.

I just ordered my iMac 27" without the SSD BTO, so I'm considering the FW800 with an Intel 510 SSD as a solid solution. In time I am going for a Thunderbolt 2.5" enclosure - but that's not exactly on the horizon at the moment.

Anyone have experience on using a FW800 with SSD as a boot solution?
 
nightfly13 said:
Heh well at least I know it's not *total* idiocy since you're thinking the same thing :)
Click to expand...

heh :)
Actually I think there is a lot of people considering this solution until the Thunderbolt products starts to emerge. In theory there shouldn't be any problem running the SSD on the FW800 port - however as we all know, theory isn't the same as real life :)
 
Possibly you will benifit a speed bump from the SSd but I think Firewire will be a bottleneck. If you can have it internal, go that way, otherwise a thunderbolt solution would be much better.
 
nightfly13 said:
Probably should have searched this in the beginning.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1046727/

Post 19 is particularly helpful.

Doing this wouldn't maximize the SSD, but seems like it does make things snappier than using the internal SATA HDD.
Click to expand...

Just want to confirm this. it works, and it's good, it will give you the responsiveness that SSD's are known for, but the FW800 will somewhat limit the top speed of the SSD.

It's so fast it's STILL worth it.

Obviously running natively on a SATA is better, but better doesn't mean it's worse than physical disks spinning.
 
So this is a viable solution until Tb enclosures are launched

I think I'm going to mark this thread as 'resolved'.

Is it totally optimal, maxing out the capability of the SSD? No. Is it an improvement over native HDD? Yes. A worth-while interim step before tb enclosures hit? Probably!

Will TB enclosures give e-sata (like internal) performance?
 
Hmm I had a tag window where I could say 'resolved' for the original post.. but now when I try to edit that, I don't have it. What am I missing?
 
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