Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Simple SSD questions for new install (Now w/SOLO-X2)

crjackson2134 said:
Thanks for all the suggestions. In the end, TM was crazy fast to restore and everything seems perfect so far.
Click to expand...

Glad it worked out. It does sound like Spotlight is still indexing. It will speed up when that is done.

Go to System Prefs and in the Startup Disk pane select the new drive as the boot disk. Without that selection the system searches around for alternate boot sources and is slow to boot. That should speed up your boot times.

----------
flowrider said:
Again, the size of the data on the 1TB HDD really doesn't matter. Even if the data on the HDD is than a MB - Apple's Restore utility won't work. The Target drive needs to be the same capacity or smaller in size than the Source drive.

Lou
Click to expand...

You can work around that by using Disk Util to shrink down the source volume to smaller than the target. In the OP's case there is 133GB of data on a 1TB drive, so you could just shrink the volume down to 200GB or so then use Disk Util to restore that volume to the 512GB SSD.
 
Weaselboy said:
Glad it worked out. It does sound like Spotlight is still indexing. It will speed up when that is done.

Go to System Prefs and in the Startup Disk pane select the new drive as the boot disk. Without that selection the system searches around for alternate boot sources and is slow to boot. That should speed up your boot
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip. I did select it as the startup but it still isn't any faster. It takes about 25 sec from bong to desktop, this is the same I got on the spinner drive. It does bench mark a lot faster but I'm not seeing it much in normal use.

The spinner got about 150/160 on Black Magic, the SSD gets 270/280 on the backplane SATA. I'm only really interested in quick boot, quick program launch, and drive longevity. I feel like I got the longetivity but I really expected a little more performance. A few apps launch quicker (FCPX & Photoshop CS6) but I'm getting a lot of beach balls on smaller apps that used to load quickly, so it's a little confusing. I repaired permissions but that really did nothing. Tomorrow I'll do a Nvram / SMC reset for good measure and see what that does.

On a side note I'm going broke this month. I went ahead and got Drive Genius. These drive utilties are costing me more than the hardware. I also replaced my clothes dryer today and the freaking thing cost $800 dollars. Last month I spent over 10G's on my AC/Heating system. I need a break here, someone please lift this voodoo curse from me...:eek: But I digress... Pain meds and coffee are getting the best of me right now, so please be patient.

How do I get the impressive boot speeds that I read about with SSDs? Was I just anticipating too much, or do I need to throw more hardware at it? What's up with the beech balling when launching half of the apps? It goes away after a couple of launches, but starts over again after a reboot.
 
Last edited:
crjackson2134 said:
How do I get the impressive boot speeds that I read about with SSDs? Was I just anticipating too much, or do I need to throw more hardware at it? What's up with the beech balling when launching half of the apps? It goes away after a couple of launches, but starts over again after a reboot.
Click to expand...

The Apricorn Solo X2 will give your SSD (and spent $) the speed it deserves. It's the difference between the SATA-II (HDD bays) / III (PCIe card) that counts here. Later, when you are able ($) to add another SSD to your collection you can even RAID0 the 2 SSD's which will boost your SSD performance even more. BUT be sure to have a rock-solid backup scheme at hand for you OS and files.

FWIW: I use CCC for my clone & back-up. Saved my bacon several times as CCC can boot also OS X, that came in handy very much.
 
Last edited:
crjackson2134 said:
Thanks for the tip. I did select it as the startup but it still isn't any faster. It takes about 25 sec from bong to desktop, this is the same I got on the spinner drive. It does bench mark a lot faster but I'm not seeing it much in normal use.

The spinner got about 150/160 on Black Magic, the SSD gets 270/280 on the backplane SATA. I'm only really interested in quick boot, quick program launch, and drive longevity. I feel like I got the longetivity but I really expected a little more performance. A few apps launch quicker (FCPX & Photoshop CS6) but I'm getting a lot of beach balls on smaller apps that used to load quickly, so it's a little confusing. I repaired permissions but that really did nothing. Tomorrow I'll do a Nvram / SMC reset for good measure and see what that does.

On a side note I'm going broke this month. I went ahead and got Drive Genius. These drive utilties are costing me more than the hardware. I also replaced my clothes dryer today and the freaking thing cost $800 dollars. Last month I spent over 10G's on my AC/Heating system. I need a break here, someone please lift this voodoo curse from me...:eek: But I digress... Pain meds and coffee are getting the best of me right now, so please be patient.

How do I get the impressive boot speeds that I read about with SSDs? Was I just anticipating too much, or do I need to throw more hardware at it? What's up with the beech balling when launching half of the apps? It goes away after a couple of launches, but starts over again after a reboot.
Click to expand...

Boot into safe mode one time to rebuild your boot cache.....hold the shift key at the boot chime....when you get to the log in screen just reboot as normal.
 
ssls6 said:
Boot into safe mode one time to rebuild your boot cache.....hold the shift key at the boot chime....when you get to the log in screen just reboot as normal.
Click to expand...

Okay, will do...

----------
BDM STUDIOS NL said:
The Apricorn Solo X2 will give your SSD (and spent $) the speed it deserves. It's the difference between the SATA-II (HDD bays) / III (PCIe card) that counts here. Later, when you are able ($) to add another SSD to your collection you can even RAID0 the 2 SSD's which will boost your SSD performance even more. BUT be sure to have a rock-solid backup scheme at hand for you OS and files.

FWIW: I use CCC for my clone & back-up. Saved my bacon several times as CCC can boot also OS X, that came in handy very much.
Click to expand...

I was thinking of one of those, but I read it actually adds time to the boot process due to scanning PCIe ports for boot device rather than going straight to the SATA buss.

That'll have to wait until next month. I back up my boot drive several time daily so that wouldn't be a problem.
 
Last edited:
crjackson2134 said:
I was thinking of one of those, but I read it actually adds time to the boot process due to scanning PCIe ports for boot device rather than going straight to the SATA buss.
Click to expand...

That is true, but it also reduces the boot time (spinning wheel under the Apple). When I get to the Apple, I get between 1.5 and 2.5 spins before the desktop. Therefor total boot time is reduced.

Lou
 
flowrider said:
That is true, but it also reduces the boot time (spinning wheel under the Apple). When I get to the Apple, I get between 1.5 and 2.5 spins before the desktop. Therefor total boot time is reduced.

Lou
Click to expand...

Wow, that's pretty quick. So would you say that from button push to desktop it's faster overall?
 
flowrider said:
^^^^Yes - That was my point.

Lou
Click to expand...

Cool, I'll have to make room since all of my PCIe slots are full, but I'll definitely have to get one.

I was really intrigued by PCIe m.2 NGFF setup, but it's too far off in price right now. I think the SOLO x2 card will be my best option. I was thinking of getting a second 840 Pro for Raid0 but that'll have to wait too. I've spent so much in the last 3 months that I need to recover a bit.
 
^^^^The Velocity Solo x2 was my choice. It is coupled with a Samsung 840 500GB SSD.

Lou
 
crjackson2134 said:
Looks like the route I'll be going too. Do you have 2 SSD's in Raid or just the one on that card?
Click to expand...

I can confirm that a RAID0 will work for (only) OS X too. My setup on the velocity is one SSD with OS X and one SSD with Windows 8 (non raided). Very happy with this little card and an absolute no-brainer for me.
 
Am I correct in that the Mac's built in controller only allows 660MB/s total for all transfers across that buss?

If this is the case, then if I have 3 drives doing really heavy transfers, this could and probably slow down my SSD that is in sled 1 correct?

So when install the VEL-SOLOX2 Extreme, the SSD is off that buss and the usage of other drives will no longer have an effect?

Also, I'm going to assume that the data being transferred over my USB 3.0 card is isolated from the intel controller's limit. Is that correct?
 
I went ahead and pulled the trigger on the vel-solo-x2 extreme from Amazon. Now I have to figure out which PCIe card I have to toss in the drawer. All my slots are full. I always figured I'd pull the RocketU USB 3.0 since I have the Inateck card too, but I really use the thing a lot.

I hate to pull my serial card, but I guess it'll have to go to storage. I use it rarely but I use it.

Damn I wish the Mac had just one more PCIe slot. If they didn't cost so much I'd get a PCIe expander box.
 
My Velocity SOLO X2 arrived today. I popped it in and ran some quickie tests. The first thing I noticed is that my boot time increased from 19 sec after chime, to 38 sec after the chime. Not real happy about that but I was expecting it.

Did an NVRAM & SMC reset, booted into recovery mode and ran a permissions repair for good measure. Nothing wrong found, nothing changed.

I'm happy to report that even though OS X may consider this an external drive, it doesn't present a desktop icon like USB drives (yey!), an unexpected pleasure for me. I like a clean desktop but I do like to see my temporarily plugged in USB drives (as opposed to the permanent ones that are plugged into the USB RAID card).

My READ/WRITE times went from about 270 MBs to .... Drumroll..... 511/550....
That was a real surprise too. I was using BlackMagic speed test, and I've read that it won't go over 400 MBs on a single drive. It may have been a fluke and I'm not going to test it again right now. I worry it will disappoint and I want to ride the mood a little while.

I had to dump my least used PCIe card (RS232) but I can live with that for now.

Some of my apps open a smidgen quicker (FCPX / PSCS6) but everything else not by much. So far the only thing I've seen that really shows it's speed up over the SATA II from my internal bay is the BlackMagic Speed benchmark.

I'll give it some time and see if rebuilding the system caches and whatnot improve that. Overall, I'm happy with it. I just wish I didn't have to sacrifice my boot speed but that's life.

Eventually, I'll get one of those NGFF cards that are reportedly able to boot really fast, but I'm happy with this so far.

---OUT
 
crjackson2134 said:
My Velocity SOLO X2 arrived today. I popped it in and ran some quickie tests. The first thing I noticed is that my boot time increased from 19 sec after chime, to 38 sec after the chime. Not real happy about that but I was expecting it.
Click to expand...

I'm up in 21 seconds after chime. And that's with 4 internal drives and 2 external drives. One is FW and the other USB.

Lou
 
flowrider said:
I'm up in 21 seconds after chime. And that's with 4 internal drives and 2 external drives. One is FW and the other USB.

Lou
Click to expand...

That's quite a bit faster than mine. I have all drive bays and all PCIe slots filled and 6 external drives. Removing the external connections doesn't make any difference for me. I'm not going to fuss with it too much. It's putting up impressive numbers otherwise.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back