Mac Pro 4,1 (2009) SSD upgrade

[kazzo]

Hi there,
I am new to this forum and I hope I can contribute as well as learn here!

I own a Mac Pro 4,1 (early 2009): 2 x 2,26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB, OS X Lion.

I am looking to upgrade this Mac Pro for general speed, specificly by upgrading to a SSD to put the OS on. Any advice on this specific machine?

I read that OCZ Vertex drives are fast but unreliable, and that Samsung 830 or Crucial M4 might be good choices. How about Intel? Any help would be very welcome. Thank you in advance!

 

[wonderspark]

I have a Crucial M4 256GB in mine, with the 309 firmware. There is 000F firmware that some have reported problems with, and have reverted back to v309, FYI.

It gets 281MB/sec reads, 456MB/sec writes via PCI, and 230MB/sec reads, 266MB/sec writes when plugged into one of the internal bays. This is a single SSD, no RAID or anything like that, tested with AJA System Test.

Anyway, pretty cheap these days! Amazon has them for $249.

 

[derbothaus]

Hi there,
I am new to this forum and I hope I can contribute as well as learn here!

I own a Mac Pro 4,1 (early 2009): 2 x 2,26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB, OS X Lion.

I am looking to upgrade this Mac Pro for general speed, specificly by upgrading to a SSD to put the OS on. Any advice on this specific machine?

I read that OCZ Vertex drives are fast but unreliable, and that Samsung 830 or Crucial M4 might be good choices. How about Intel? Any help would be very welcome. Thank you in advance!

Samsung, Intel, and Crucial should be considered. OCZ Vertex is just a Sandforce re-brand as is Kingston Hyper-X, OWC, and others. If you want OCZ speed then buy the Intel 520 (better firmware, top bin NAND). Otherwise they will all serve you well and pretty much saturate your internal connection. Look at 4K random read/ writes and iops for better indication of boot drive performance. The big headline grabbing high read and write sequential speeds matter very little day to day. Samsung and Crucial will most likely require the Cindori's TRIM enabler. But it works very well at the moment.

 

[DJenkins]

I went with the OCZ agility 3 and have been quite happy. It's a cheaper option to the vertex models but being my first SSD the difference between this and the old HDD is phenomenal.