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Deciding between three SSDs for 2011 Mini.

Ice Dragon

Ice Dragon

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 16, 2009
989
20
Yeah another SSD topic though I just wanted to see where things stand.

I'm looking at three based on a few years research looking at different brands.

Crucial m4 - I have my heart set on this one seeing as how I'm getting my memory from Crucial and I hear Crucial's SSDs are reliable.

OWC Mercury Extreme 6G - I know they use Sandforce and Sandforce isn't perfect with reliability though OWC stands behind they sell and have great tech support.

Samsung 470 series - Heard good things about these but this is a distant third option. (I know there will be SATA III Samsung drives released in October)

So... mainly it's between Crucial and Sandforce.
 
FWIW, I have a crucial M4 512GB in my MBP. I put it in late july. There have been 2 firmware upgrades sent out by Crucial. I haven't experienced any problems at all.
 
I would either go with the Samsung 470 or the Crucial M4. I'll be getting both next week, so hopefully once I've played with both, I'll be able to say further about either.
 
samsung 470 has been good for me I also have crucial's 300's and they are good. Intel was good but The 320 series has had a firmware bug so I do not pick it for people.
 
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I've used both the OWC ME Pro 3G and 6G. Perfect reliability and excellent support from OWC for Macs. I just ordered OCZ Vertex 3 Max IOPS for the Mini as they will be media servers. So I'm taking a calculated risk trying out the higher transaction drive.
 
I wouldn't be caught dead using an OCZ drive given what I've heard about their tech support.
 
OWC's SandForce SSDs work fine. Just be sure to not enable TRIM as Apple's TRIM support doesn't work with the Garbage Collection of Sandforce SSDs. Trim works fine with Windows 7, so it's clearly a problem with Mac OS X's implementation of TRIM.
 
mdgm said:
OWC's SandForce SSDs work fine. Just be sure to not enable TRIM as Apple's TRIM support doesn't work with the Garbage Collection of Sandforce SSDs. Trim works fine with Windows 7, so it's clearly a problem with Mac OS X's implementation of TRIM.
Click to expand...

If trim was enabled by Apple for 3rd party drives, it would be an Apple driver issue. They seem tuned for Samsung & Toshiba SSD's & their controllers :D

+1 on the 470 or wait a couple weeks for their SATA III product. Should be a screamer.
 
It depends on the price though one reason I'm leaning towards the new Samsung drive is write speed (500 MB/s read and 400 MB/s write) in addition to their reputation of reliability. Crucial, for their SATA III 128 GB drive, is only offering 175 MB/s write. The 415 MB/s read speed is respectable.

Meanwhile, the current 470 series while offering less read speeds (250 MB/s) offers better write speeds (220 MB/s)
 
I prefer the Sandforce 2200 series controls because they are more resilient with incompressible data (see Anandtech SSD tests). Plus, there is no need for the TRIM hack.
 
Ice Dragon said:
It depends on the price though one reason I'm leaning towards the new Samsung drive is write speed (500 MB/s read and 400 MB/s write) in addition to their reputation of reliability. Crucial, for their SATA III 128 GB drive, is only offering 175 MB/s write. The 415 MB/s read speed is respectable.

Meanwhile, the current 470 series while offering less read speeds (250 MB/s) offers better write speeds (220 MB/s)
Click to expand...


New Samsung drive?
 
I just bought the mac mini server this morning, I'm also debating between four SSD.

Since I also bought a MBA the same time, I want to keep the price of the SSD as low as possible without too much performance lost.

My need will only require 120GB, since there's the secondary HD and also I use external for storage.

The price I can get them here in Canada are:
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G - $369.95
Patriot Wildfire - $299.99 - $40 Rebate = $259.99
OCZ Vertex 3 - $219.99 - $20 Rebate = $199.99
OCZ Vertex 3 Max IPOS - $259.99

I crossed M4 out of my list because the 120GB version seems slower than the other ones I'm deciding on.

Anyone can suggest which one to get? I don't want to save $ if it'll really affect the performance. Also, should I wait for the samsung before making my decision?
 
120GB is slower than 240GB in general because of the extra channels enabled. More chips that you can access in parallel means more bandwidth.

If you're sticking with 120GB and using hard drives for most of your data storage, just get the cheapest of the 4. You're not likely to max out the drive's I/O anyway if you're not constantly running heavy db workloads from the SSD.

While I don't know what you'll be doing with this server, I'm inclined to believe you're not likely to be able to notice the difference between the four SSDs without a stopwatch.

ecPixel said:
I just bought the mac mini server this morning, I'm also debating between four SSD.

Since I also bought a MBA the same time, I want to keep the price of the SSD as low as possible without too much performance lost.

My need will only require 120GB, since there's the secondary HD and also I use external for storage.

The price I can get them here in Canada are:
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G - $369.95
Patriot Wildfire - $299.99 - $40 Rebate = $259.99
OCZ Vertex 3 - $219.99 - $20 Rebate = $199.99
OCZ Vertex 3 Max IPOS - $259.99

I crossed M4 out of my list because the 120GB version seems slower than the other ones I'm deciding on.

Anyone can suggest which one to get? I don't want to save $ if it'll really affect the performance. Also, should I wait for the samsung before making my decision?
Click to expand...
 
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