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Shopping for SSD for partitioned dual OS boot disc

K

Krackle

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 1, 2015
29
4
I just upgraded a 2009 Mac Pro 2.66 quad> to a 3.33ghz 6 core.

I need to run Snow Leopard for some old devices and also Mavericks..

Looking for a good future proof (relatively, large enough for each partition) SSD setup..I want to create two bootable partitions with each OS

Just want to make sure I have enough space to load software into each partition and maybe a bit of data here and there..Most of my data goes to dedicated data drives.

Sort of feels like my best bet is a 1T SSD...nothing in between 500 and 1T anywhere? the Mavericks disc will have more stuff on it by a longshot..Snow Leopard disc will be narrowly focused on specific software and device drivers etc..

Also and just as important..What kind of setup are you guys using? Pci, drive tray adapter etc?

I noticed a card somewhere that accommodated two separate drives?

Looking for all options out there and advice in general..

Thanks
 
I get by with 250 gigs for boot drive by keeping most data on other SSDs. On my studio MP, the boot SSD, a what has proven to be quite solid (Sandforce!) Intel 520, is sitting in a slide in tray adaptor and running on a native SATA2 bus. For the small pulls OS drives typically see, the SATA2 speed is not much of a bottleneck (if at all). Critical DATA SSDs are Samsung 850 EVO drives sitting on a SATA3 bus provided by a PCIe card.

Today, I would recommend the Samsung 850 EVO SSDs, which have proven to be reliable and as speedy as SATA drives get. Simplest place to put the boot SSD is in your optical bay, connected to the second optical SATA port your 2009 MP provides. Move the optical drive to the bottom slot and sit your boot SSD on top. Secure it with some double sided tape if you are concerned about it moving, but if you don't move your MP, your SSD won't have any reason to slide around.

If you want to get into SATA3 for cheap, look into one of the many ASM1061 cards sold on eBay. Under $10 and gets you very close to top SATA3 throughput for a single drive (although two can be connected to the card, if both are active, total bandwidth is limited due to PCIe 1x interface). Despite the fact the card sellers typically don't mention it, the ASM1061 is plug and play under macOS.

Don't forget to enable TRIM! If using older OS versions, look into Cindori's Trim enabler. And consider Sierra; it works great on a 4,1>5,1 and brings a lot of very nice features, particularly if you have another Mac, iPad or iPhone.
 
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A 1TB Samsung 850 EVO would be a good choice, partitioning and dual-boot is no problem.

How you mount it is up to you and what you want/expect.
  • Connect up to one of the existing SATA ports and you'll get 3G performance (~300MB/s)
  • Install a PCIe adapter from OWC ($50) and mount the SSD to it to get 6G performance (~600MB/s)
  • Install a dual-drive PCIe adapter from Sonnet ($240) and mount 1 or 2 SSDs to it with 6G performance
 
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Yahooligan said:
A 1TB Samsung 850 EVO would be a good choice, partitioning and dual-boot is no problem.

How you mount it is up to you and what you want/expect.
  • Connect up to one of the existing SATA ports and you'll get 3G performance (~300MB/s)
  • Install a PCIe adapter from OWC ($50) and mount the SSD to it to get 6G performance (~600MB/s)
  • Install a dual-drive PCIe adapter from Sonnet ($240) and mount 1 or 2 SSDs to it with 6G performance
Click to expand...
Yahool,

Is this the same thing from OWC (PCI SSD 2 drive card)??

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet Technologies/TSATA6SSDE/
 
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