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Best ssd for mac pro

RustBoy said:
I am about to install Lion onto a new SSD drive. I would like to keep some apps and some data on a separate drive. Can I simply create an alias for the entire user folder and store the contents wherever I want?
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Not really. This for entire user folder:
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/05/14/tuaw-tip-moving-your-home-folder-to-another-disk-or-moving-it/
With the caveat that you should keep the ~/Library folder and ALL apps on your boot drive and just symlink the other folders for best performance:
ln -s /Original/path /the/new/location
Alias have been known to fail in some apps.
 
ClassObject said:
nice ad
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yep, I joined this site and posted for 3 years so that I could advertise for slickdeals! Busted :(




Anyway, I wanted to ask a question: since my Mac Pro doesnt have SATA III, what is the maximum read speed I should be looking at for an SSD? I dont want to waste money on a quality drive if a slower SSD would have the exact same result on SATA II.
 
If I were buying one today, Id probably go with an OCZ Vertex 4.
 
Ravich said:
yep, I joined this site and posted for 3 years so that I could advertise for slickdeals! Busted :(




Anyway, I wanted to ask a question: since my Mac Pro doesnt have SATA III, what is the maximum read speed I should be looking at for an SSD? I dont want to waste money on a quality drive if a slower SSD would have the exact same result on SATA II.
Click to expand...

You actually waste money looking at specs like that. Is this for boot drive or storage/scratch/streaming? SATA II gets you in the 260-280MB/s range. But the SATAIII have dramatically better iops and 4K random speeds which make a better boot drive anyway and none of those operation are link bound right now. So a newer SSD regardless of whether you can utilize it's full streaming bandwidth is still quite a bit faster as a boot drive than an older model. Of course older models are a bit cheaper and any SSD will feel really fast. Some of the older SSD's can't take much abuse either. Fill them up 3/4 of the way and they drop performance 50% or more. Newer SSD's have seemed to fix these early issues. SSD market is a shark tank.
 
Are there any SATA PCI-E cards out there that you can directly attach a 2.5" drive to? I'm not talking about the guts of an SSD on a card or SSD + normal drive hybrids.

One of Sonnet's older products is the Tempo HD which is a PCI card that will hold a 2.5" ATA drive. When I first saw it I wondered how many people would use it since I think the price and performance differences between 3.5" and 2.5" drivers were much bigger then.

tempohd.jpg


I've been looking at SSDs for my 2009 Mac Pro but don't want to give up a optical or hard drive slot. It'd be nice to find something like this (that was bootable like OWC's Accelsior cards) that I could stick a normal SSD onto. Stick on an eSATA port or two and it'd be even better.
 
derbothaus said:
So a newer SSD regardless of whether you can utilize it's full streaming bandwidth is still quite a bit faster as a boot drive than an older model. Of course older models are a bit cheaper and any SSD will feel really fast. Some of the older SSD's can't take much abuse either. Fill them up 3/4 of the way and they drop performance 50% or more. Newer SSD's have seemed to fix these early issues. SSD market is a shark tank.
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Can you give an example of one of those newer models?

Of course, new SSDs could come out until the new Mac Pro comes out...
 
Nostromo said:
Can you give an example of one of those newer models?

Of course, new SSDs could come out until the new Mac Pro comes out...
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I am referring mainly to Sandforce as that is what I have been running lately. Marvel old vs. new probably the same type of gains especially in the "slowing down from punishment" catagory. SF-1200 vs. SF-2281. Or Vertex 2 vs Vertex 3 or whatever distro suits you. I am using OWC and Intel. 4K random on crystalDiskMark SF-1200 was around 16MB/s Read, 21MB/s write. SF-2281 on same is 38MB/s Read and 89MB/s write. Pretty staggering actually with random data. Other test I did was Xbench Disk Test final numbers all on 3G SATA were: SF-1200 = 278, SF-2281 = 450. The SF-2281 was on average 2x as fast all within the 3G limits.
 
lastmile said:
Apparently yes...Apricorn Velocity Solo Mac Edition. Have to look into this. At $50 there has to be a catch.
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From what I've seen, the catch is that the Marvell chip they use will only do 400mb/s. They called this out as a chip limitation on their site for a while but I can't find it now.

ETA: For $50, I'm thinking of giving it a go anyway.
 
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derbothaus said:
I am referring mainly to Sandforce as that is what I have been running lately. Marvel old vs. new probably the same type of gains especially in the "slowing down from punishment" catagory. SF-1200 vs. SF-2281. Or Vertex 2 vs Vertex 3 or whatever distro suits you. I am using OWC and Intel. 4K random on crystalDiskMark SF-1200 was around 16MB/s Read, 21MB/s write. SF-2281 on same is 38MB/s Read and 89MB/s write. Pretty staggering actually with random data. Other test I did was Xbench Disk Test final numbers all on 3G SATA were: SF-1200 = 278, SF-2281 = 450. The SF-2281 was on average 2x as fast all within the 3G limits.
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I'm particularly referring to your comment on older SSDs slowing down even when only half or three quarters full.

I wouldn't want such a disc.

So, you're fine with the Sandforce controller? Has it overcome its problems?
 
Nostromo said:
I'm particularly referring to your comment on older SSDs slowing down even when only half or three quarters full.

I wouldn't want such a disc.

So, you're fine with the Sandforce controller? Has it overcome its problems?
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I don't know. I can't speak for Sandforce. I have had 5 of their drives pass through. I run Intel 520 240GB on Mac Pro right now, no issues. Macbook has OWC 3G 240GB and it seems really slow (for SSD) at 3/4 full. Fault of SF-1200 punishment. Had 2x OWC 6G 240GB's. One died, one still working after many months and the replacement for the dead one had link negotiating firmware issues with my 2008 book (and a linux based firmware updater that wouldn't even see the SSD as connected) so it went back for the slower 3G. I'm solid now but it has been bumpy.
 
codymac said:
From what I've seen, the catch is that the Marvell chip they use will only do 400mb/s. They called this out as a chip limitation on their site for a while but I can't find it now.

ETA: For $50, I'm thinking of giving it a go anyway.
Click to expand...

Aren't the SATA ports in the Mac Pro limited to 300 MB/s? If so then $50 gets you a bit of a step up in speed, a place to mount the drive, and saves on the cost of a sled suitable for a 2.5" SSD.

I was also looking at putting an SSD in one of OWC's external USB3/eSATA 6G enclosures and adding the CalDigit USB3/eSATA card. A combo eSATA+USB power cable would let you power the drive with a single cable. And you'd have USB3.

I'll probably end up sticking with a normal hard drive until something like the OWC Accelsior drops in price a bit - or not. The best setup would be an 8-drive, good quality RAID card connected to the four internal hard drive bays plus an SSD stuck somewhere internally or in an external enclosure if the card had an external port.
 
lastmile said:
Aren't the SATA ports in the Mac Pro limited to 300 MB/s? If so then $50 gets you a bit of a step up in speed, a place to mount the drive, and saves on the cost of a sled suitable for a 2.5" SSD.
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Absolutely.

My thinking is...

Nearly all current SSDs are SATAIII, the Apricorn card effectively cuts the performance down to max 400 MB/s while the PCIe 2.0 slot is cutting it to 500 MB/s, IIRC.

I noticed a post on Newegg feedback from Apricorn in response to a user and where Apricorn was claiming up to 500 MB/s. It would make sense considering another post I saw from a user on amazon who claimed Apricorn customer support stated they were updating the card to be faster.

I won't notice if I lose ~10 MB/s on reads off the top but, on principle, I'd hate to pay up for an SSD and hamstring it by limiting it to 3/4-4/5 of it's performance. I don't want to drive around with the parking brake on.
;)

I'm still interested, but I'll call them directly before I buy if I go that way. If they've updated the card, then I think it'd be a great solution (for me, anyway).
 
That card looks cool but not into the 220MB/s write limit should at least be a 2x card. 80% or so of computing is random writes. SATA 3G would actually be faster as it can get to 260-280MB/s on writes and the difference on reads from 280 - 400MB/s (theoretical) on stuff you do 10% of the time just does not seem worth the overhead. Just me. Still very cool and even better very cheap.
 
There's also a review on newegg where a company rep responds to somebody complaining about the speed. The reviewer doesn't seem to know what he's talking about...and the rep lets him know it. :) He then suggests the guy call tech support to see if they can help him get his speeds up to ~ 500MB/s.

I saw the comments on the Amazon review that said there is apparently a new version of the card out (or coming out this month) that can hit 500 MB/s read and write. Too bad they don't move to a PCI-E 2.0 x4 interface!

After going through those comments I finally found out what is installed in that pic of a Mac Pro at the top of Apricorn's desktop upgrades page! A PCI 2.0 x4 card that holds four SSDs and has RAID functionality. Its only SATA2 and their specs say 791 MB/s average read speed and 675 MB/s average write speed. Its out of stock though the PCI-X version is available. Maybe they're going to release a SATA3 version.

I'm not planning on setting up a SSD RAID but that card (or hopefully an updated version) would be great for making use of older SSDs after you upgrade to a larger or faster one. Stick the new one on the card, make it your new boot drive, and relegate the old one to another use. But with the current chipset it won't boot in a Mac so there goes that idea.

I've tried several times to send a message to tech support and keep getting an error when submitting the form.
 
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I just got off the phone with Apricorn tech support. The guy I spoke with was great.

I was told that they've finished testing and are in production on new Velocity Solo cards that will be faster (~550 MB/s). The cards should hit retail channels within 1-2 months (as they'll need to test/QA production samples as well before releasing them).

I was also told that the price will probably be slightly higher (probably $10 more) and that the cards should get new model names to differentiate them.

I'll be buying one of the new ones for at least one of my machines, probably two.
:cool:
 
That sounds good, I'll wait to pick one up when the new model comes out. Just bought a Crucial M4 256GB from buy.com on ebay for $199 shipped. :)

Edit 05/21/12 - Wow, I thought free shipping would have been slow but the drive is here already! Can't wait to try it out.
 
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let us know, I am burning for this card...

This is outstanding, I was looking into the exact same product. Now a new version is coming out. Book me in, I will go for one as well. I hope it works with a MacPro 3,1 since they have some limits on the pci slot compared to the 2009 model.

It would be great if you could let us know once you got the card in for comparison and experience..

Thanks for this great "still in the pipeline product"..

:apple:
 
Full Disclosure: I work for Fusion-io.

Do you want the best SSD, or do you want the best solid state storage period?

Our MLC products are based on the same MLC NAND Flash that are used in commercial and consumer grade SSDs, but have wear leveling and performance characteristics that make them enterprise grade. They are NOT SSD (disk form factor solid state). They fit in a PCIe slot, leaving your disk slots for "bulk storage" like 1-3TB SATA drives. They also have much lower latency as they don't use SATA protocols which add overhead.

We recently released ioFX which targets content creators, and it's a bit more affordable than our datacenter class ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo models.

Anyhow, if you want the best, I think Fusion-io has the best. But again, full disclosure, I work for Fusion-io.
 
derbothaus said:
You actually waste money looking at specs like that. Is this for boot drive or storage/scratch/streaming? SATA II gets you in the 260-280MB/s range. But the SATAIII have dramatically better iops and 4K random speeds which make a better boot drive anyway and none of those operation are link bound right now. So a newer SSD regardless of whether you can utilize it's full streaming bandwidth is still quite a bit faster as a boot drive than an older model. Of course older models are a bit cheaper and any SSD will feel really fast. Some of the older SSD's can't take much abuse either. Fill them up 3/4 of the way and they drop performance 50% or more. Newer SSD's have seemed to fix these early issues. SSD market is a shark tank.
Click to expand...

This is for streaming. I am a bit confused as to why you'd say that older SSDs drop in performance when they fill up. I have heard many times from multiple sources that one of the benefits of SSDs is that you can fill them up without worrying about performance issues like with RPM HDDs.

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ClassObject said:
Busted??? Its done all the time. Sometimes, surprisingly, by dudes posting anonymously on a internet forum.
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Have these dudes been posting at said forums for 3 years without advertising? You are being ridiculous, but if you are unwilling to swallow your pride on this one I wont hold it against you.
 
Ravich said:
This is for streaming. I am a bit confused as to why you'd say that older SSDs drop in performance when they fill up. I have heard many times from multiple sources that one of the benefits of SSDs is that you can fill them up without worrying about performance issues like with RPM
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Look at reviews in which they actually do fill up the drive and test. They are somewhat rare unfortunately. Most reviews are with fresh state un-TRIMed SSD's.
I am only talking about gen 1 SSD's. SSD's later on have, for the most part, fixed this so that they are in line with the marketing that started it.
 
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