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Crucial MX200 500GB and Mac Pro 3,1

honeycombz

honeycombz

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 6, 2013
588
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Hey, about to purchase the Crucial MX200 for my Mac Pro 3,1 and thought it wouldn't be a problem to enable trimforce but then got on Crucial chat and they are telling me trimforce isn't compatible with their drives? Does anyone know anything about this?
 
honeycombz said:
Hey, about to purchase the Crucial MX200 for my Mac Pro 3,1 and thought it wouldn't be a problem to enable trimforce but then got on Crucial chat and they are telling me trimforce isn't compatible with their drives? Does anyone know anything about this?
Click to expand...
Yes it is. Whoever said that from Crucial is mistaken.
 
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Thank you. Seems strange that they would be so incorrect but maybe they just don't want to deal with it. Gonna get this to be my main boot SSD along with an Apricorn Velocity card. There is a good deal on this drive but wondering if anyone suggests a better drive? 500gb? Within same price range? I was looking at the Transcend but then just thought I'd go Crucial.
 
honeycombz said:
Thank you. Seems strange that they would be so incorrect but maybe they just don't want to deal with it. Gonna get this to be my main boot SSD along with an Apricorn Velocity card. There is a good deal on this drive but wondering if anyone suggests a better drive? 500gb? Within same price range? I was looking at the Transcend but then just thought I'd go Crucial.
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That drive and the Samsung EVO are about the best bang for the buck right now. I'd just grab whichever you can find cheapest.
 
pastrychef said:
Personally, I have favored Crucial SSDs for years and have installed it for quite a few people. None of them have ever given me any problems to date.
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Once or twice Crucial issue firmware for their SSD to even work properly in Mac. Otherwise it was trouble and lead to problems.

2011 when the transition to SATA III was made nearly any SSD had firmware and controller problems.
 
I am FAR from being one of the experts on thins board, but that said I recently installed the MX200 500GBin my late 2008 MacBook Pro and I love it. Still, there are some Mac issues to be aware of: I have been told that it is a mistake to use Trim on this card with a Mac, I have no technical knowledge about this, but smarter people have told me not to do it. Also, be aware that the hardware encryption will not work on Mac. Crucial has a sly way of suggesting that it works on every system, it just happens that while it "works" on Mac you can't lock it on Mac so it's worthless.

That said, my second choice behind the MX200 was the Samsung Evo: all the reviews rate it slightly faster than the MX (in most circumstances), but that is using its Magician software that allocates some of the system ram to caching for the ssd. That only works on Windows machines, so is irrelevant to us. The MX200 is faster...but the bx100 isn't far behind. It doesn't have hardware encryption, but that doesn't work on Mac anyway :)
 
syrinxfilms said:
I am FAR from being one of the experts on thins board, but that said I recently installed the MX200 500GBin my late 2008 MacBook Pro and I love it. Still, there are some Mac issues to be aware of: I have been told that it is a mistake to use Trim on this card with a Mac, I have no technical knowledge about this, but smarter people have told me not to do it. Also, be aware that the hardware encryption will not work on Mac. Crucial has a sly way of suggesting that it works on every system, it just happens that while it "works" on Mac you can't lock it on Mac so it's worthless.

That said, my second choice behind the MX200 was the Samsung Evo: all the reviews rate it slightly faster than the MX (in most circumstances), but that is using its Magician software that allocates some of the system ram to caching for the ssd. That only works on Windows machines, so is irrelevant to us. The MX200 is faster...but the bx100 isn't far behind. It doesn't have hardware encryption, but that doesn't work on Mac anyway :)
Click to expand...

I installed a Crucial SSD (I think an MX100) in my 2007 "Santa Rosa" MacBook Pro and it has worked very well. I also have an EVO 850 in a stock drive bay of my Mac Pro 4,1 -> 5,1. That one has been great too. Installing them in an older machine is liberating in a way because you can pretty much ignore any minor speed differences between the Crucial and the Samsung since they are going to be limited by the bus speed anyway. Both have been great to me and you could pick either one and probably be very happy.
 
IMHO, the Best SSDs out their right now are the Samsungs. The Evo series is best on a performance/cost basis.

Lou
 
Hey guys, so I'm up and running on the CT500MX as well as the Velocity Solo X1 card by Apricorn. Opted not to get the X2 because I'm hoping to get a new machine in a 1-2 years so just wanted to breath a bit more life into the machine. Seems like it will work great for my needs. I'm wondering about a few things. I have cloned the system and applications over to the SSD which now serves as my boot drive (Had to zap pram to get it to be recognized as the boot volume), and then repointed the user folder in system preferences (ctrl click > advanced options) to the existing spinner drive I've been using. Everything seems to work but the SSD did create a User folder with my home directory in it even though it's got a bunch of empty folders in it. Should I leave all this? Also, I keep my itunes stuff on another spinner and for whatever reason I had to create an empty 'Shared' folder in the SSD User directory to get iTunes to work properly. Seems fine now, just wondering if this is normal. Dropbox wants me to re-login, before doing so I just wanted to check and see if it will remember the dropbox folder on the spinner drive or try to create a new one on the SSD? Are these normal parts of transitioning to another drive in this manner? I'm repairing permissions now, wondering if I should also empty all caches as well? As far as trim goes, I'm still on 10.9.5 for the time being, will probably skip Yosemite and go straight to El Capitain when it comes out so I downloaded SSD Chameleon. Is trim something I turn on and leave it on or is it something I should just turn on as more of maintenance like once a month for a couple days. Thanks for all the help you guys are very informative.
 
honeycombz said:
Are these normal parts of transitioning to another drive in this manner?
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Not in my experience.

How did you clone your drive? You shouldn't have had to create new user folders and there shouldn't be empty folders all over the place.

Putting your iTunes library on another drive is as simple as pointing to it. I don't know why you needed a new shared folder.
 
I cloned the drive with SuperDuper but excluded the User directory. I don't know why I needed a new shared folder either for iTunes but seems as though there are others who ran into the same thing. It seems to work. Dropbox I just had to re-login and point back where I wanted it to go. Things seem to be running good however I am having a problem with FontExplorer not wanting to work and re-license itself. Not understanding this... guess I could contact Linotype but would rather not mess up my font library. Anyone familiar enough to know if I'm supposed to do something special with FontExplorer? Seems to be the only piece holding out here. Also, I seem to be unable to view invisible files on the SSD like I used to. Thoughts on my previous question about trim? Should I start this entire process over? Trying not to panic :(.
 
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Was there any particular reason why you didn't also clone the user folder? I usually just clone the whole drive. Everything. Then just replace the old drive with new. Never encountered any issues.

Also, be aware that by using SuperDuper!, you lose the recovery partition on your new drive.
 
What backup application would you recommend. I was not aware of this. There is no way to custom script SuperDuper! to maintain the recovery partition? I didn't clone the user folder because I'm going from a 1tb Spinner to a 500mb SSD. Wanted to keep the data files, project, music, fonts, etc. separate. I was following these instructions: http://macintoshhowto.com/hardware/how-to-speed-up-your-mac-with-a-ssd-drive.html
 
I see. What is the benefit of having a recovery partition if you have multiple boot disks lying around and installed in the machine anyways?

I guess I'll have to contact Linotype because I don't understand why it seems to be a problem running the application off another drive.
 
honeycombz said:
I see. What is the benefit of having a recovery partition if you have multiple boot disks lying around and installed in the machine anyways?
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Some OS X features like FileVault full disk encryption and Back to my Mac require the recovery partition.
 
I never use those but good to know. Wishing FontExplorer wasn't being such a pain... unable to finalize setup at the moment because of it.
 
honeycombz said:
Hey, about to purchase the Crucial MX200 for my Mac Pro 3,1 and thought it wouldn't be a problem to enable trimforce but then got on Crucial chat and they are telling me trimforce isn't compatible with their drives? Does anyone know anything about this?
Click to expand...
I have four (4) of these in my Mac Pro and have no trouble with enabled TRIM. I suspected it earlier, but that likely turned out to be an issue with a large Fusion Drive - Apple might not have tested that kind of configuration.
I am back to having the system on a 1TB MX200 coupled with a 4TB hybrid HD. The latter has the complete system and is bootable, but I have the main System, Applications, and User directories duplicated on the SSD and the rest linked via symbolic link.
The other SSDs hold Windows 10 (M500-960GB), Window 7 and my main VMware guests (MX100s-512GB).
I have a bunch of others in my kids MacBook and MacBook Pros as upgrades. All are Crucial - all work well. All have trim enabled.
 
pastrychef said:
CarbonCopyCloner retains the recovery partition or you could remake the recovery partition. Instructions can be found HERE.
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I would like to voice my support for CarbonCopyCloner. The beta version now supports El Capitan. This is a utility that has gotten better and better. The second essential item for Boot Camp copying and backup is WinClone.
I also like Coriolis' iPartition, which has saved me a number of times with mislabeled partitions etc. But an update is way overdue (and promised), it does not properly support CoreStorage.
CarbonCopyCloner can be set up to time backups automatically and is very configurable without scripting. However, scripting can be added.
 
One other thing to be aware of is that the Crucial firmware updater (standalone boot) only recognizes the standard four ports. You cannot flash drives connected to add-on controllers, even if they are bootable.
The MX200 is now at MU02, but still shipped with MU01 a month ago.
 
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