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SSD help!

DannyBres

DannyBres

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Oct 30, 2007
1,412
6
UK
I am considerign an SSD as the HDD in my iMac is definately the bottle neck in its performance. It is sluggish booting and loading apps etc etc.

what philosophy should I use for an SSD drive? What should i store on it? the OS, all apps and what else?! should my iPhoto library be on there for example?

I will have an

SSD (hopefully this thread will help me determine the size of it)

1TB internal HDD (currently Everything - films)

&

2TB external (currently time machine + films)
 
I would do a clean install of the OS apps and store all files and folders that will be written to, deleted etc on the 7200 drive that's in there now. That would me media and docs of any kind. After filling all the blocks the SSD drive will begin to slow after a few months, so keeping routine writing and deleting to a minimum except for software updates will keep the performance in a good range for longer.:cool:
 
unless you're rich and can get a 500GB SSD, you can store what ever you want on it. Otherwise, OS & the apps you use the most - leave your music/movies/pics etc on a hdd

the min SSD size I'd go for would be 90GB
 
Do you know how/where you are going to install it?

I have a hard time understanding how an i7 iMac is "sluggish".

And sluggish when? surfing the web? opening a 500 gig photoshop file? importing 200 RAW photos?

perhaps your problem isnt hardware related but software? have you tried a new user? you say slow on booting, why shutdown? just sleep. how much ram do you have? boost to 12 or 16 gigs and keep all your apps open?
 
cinek said:
Otherwise, OS & the apps you use the most - leave your music/movies/pics etc on a hdd
Click to expand...
I don't mean to hijack this thread (well, OK, maybe a little) but has anyone seen a good tutorial that discusses how to manage this aspect of using a combination of small-ish SSD for apps plus a larger HDD for data?

What I mean is, right offhand I wouldn't know how to move my iTunes/iPhoto libraries from their current locations to a different "data" drive and still be able to access them from the apps running on an SSD. And I can imagine I'd run into similar issues with other apps. I'd like to see an article that discusses what happens after you actually get the SSD hardware installed, and how you move forward with configuring things...
 
Lets start with what is your budget? This pretty much determines the capacity of an SSD you can get and also what to put there. If cost is not a problem, then the question is, how much data do you have that you would like to put in the SSD (in this case, what are the sizes of your Apps folder and iPhoto Library for instance)?

OS X and apps in the SSD is the most common way of handling this. That way, you can usually get away with a 120GB SSD which are fairly affordable. iPhoto will definitely speed up if the library is in the SSD but there are other factors that determine is it worth it to put the library in there.

I assume you are going to do the upgrade yourself?

Lyle said:
I don't mean to hijack this thread (well, OK, maybe a little) but has anyone seen a good tutorial that discusses how to manage this aspect of using a combination of small-ish SSD for apps plus a larger HDD for data?

What I mean is, right offhand I wouldn't know how to move my iTunes/iPhoto libraries from their current locations to a different "data" drive and still be able to access them from the apps running on an SSD. And I can imagine I'd run into similar issues with other apps. I'd like to see an article that discusses what happens after you actually get the SSD hardware installed, and how you move forward with configuring things...
Click to expand...

Moving the Home folder is the most common way. That way all your data besides apps and system files will be in the HD instead of the SSD.
 
Hellhammer said:
Lets start with what is your budget? This pretty much determines the capacity of an SSD you can get and also what to put there. If cost is not a problem, then the question is, how much data do you have that you would like to put in the SSD (in this case, what are the sizes of your Apps folder and iPhoto Library for instance)?
Click to expand...
I'd love to keep the total cost (OptiBay adapter plus the drive) around $300, which probably limits the SSD size to about 120Gb.

My MacBook Pro currently has a 320Gb HDD. DaisyDisk says that:
  • Size of "Applications" folder is 14 Gb
  • Total size of home folder is 231 Gb. Of that, 110 Gb is taken up by "Documents", 62 Gb by "Music" (iTunes) and 13Gb by "Pictures" (iPhoto).

Hellhammer said:
OS X and apps in the SSD is the most common way of handling this. That way, you can usually get away with a 120GB SSD which are fairly affordable. iPhoto will definitely speed up if the library is in the SSD but there are other factors that determine is it worth it to put the library in there.
Click to expand...
Yes, that's what I was thinking.

Hellhammer said:
I assume you are going to do the upgrade yourself?
Click to expand...
Yes, was assuming I'd go with the MCD OptiBay and an SSD from NewEgg or whatever. I have done memory upgrades and hard drive upgrades on my Mac notebooks in the past and am pretty comfortable with that kind of thing.

Hellhammer said:
Moving the Home folder is the most common way. That way all your data besides apps and system files will be in the HD instead of the SSD.
Click to expand...
Cool, that sounds very promising, thanks for the link. I hope to be able to make this upgrade some time this year. Maybe I'll get lucky and the SSD prices will drop again before long.
 
Lyle said:
I'd love to keep the total cost (OptiBay adapter plus the drive) around $300, which probably limits the SSD size to about 120Gb.

My MacBook Pro currently has a 320Gb HDD. DaisyDisk says that:
  • Size of "Applications" folder is 14 Gb
  • Total size of home folder is 231 Gb. Of that, 110 Gb is taken up by "Documents", 62 Gb by "Music" (iTunes) and 13Gb by "Pictures" (iPhoto).
Click to expand...

120GB should be more than fine then. You can easily put your iPhoto library in the SSD and still have tens of GBs of empty space (that is good since your amount of data will increase as the time goes by).

Yes, was assuming I'd go with the MCD OptiBay and an SSD from NewEgg or whatever. I have done memory upgrades and hard drive upgrades on my Mac notebooks in the past and am pretty comfortable with that kind of thing.
Click to expand...

OWC has good video tutorials about installing the OptiBay (or DataDoubler like they call it) into MBP (you were talking about MBP so I assume that is the target of the upgrade). Not much harder than swapping the HD. iMac is a bit different.
 
Have you thought about going esata with a RAID 5 setup? I think you get the most bang-for-the-buck that way, and four disks set up as RAID 5 is nearly as fast as an SSD, and you'll have a much larger drive.

Just something to think about.

Have fun,
skinny*k

Edit: Make that RAID 0 for speed, RAID 5 is good too, though.
 
Last edited:
I do not have a budget, whatever I need I will save up, If a 60gb will do my i'd buy that if I need 256gb, I'll save up! :)

I have considered a RAID setup, but seems a bit too much atm.

I plan to put in in my iMac in the spare SATA socket on the logicboard. Anyone know if they sell housing for latest iMacs yet? What affects will this have on my apple care and warranty?

Sluggish... I'll makes notes tonight and tell you! :) I remember apertiure 3 being horribly slow when i tried it last year.

I shutdown because I work away from home so do not use it from Fri morning to monday night (it is in my house at work).

Hmmm, I might get one for all my apps and OS (~90gb) and just leave all media on the 1tb drive.

I am very tempted by this! http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?imodule=CTFDDAC064MAG-1G1
 
Lyle (the hijacker)

moving iPhoto and iTunes libraries is easy, go to:

iPhoto >> Help >> type in "move library" and follow the instructions (who knew?)

Both of you need to be careful about buying cheap SSDs. Not all SSDs are created equally. OWC has some good info, as well as barefeats.
 
skinny*k said:
Have you thought about going esata with a RAID 5 setup? I think you get the most bang-for-the-buck that way, and four disks set up as RAID 5 is nearly as fast as an SSD, and you'll have a much larger drive.

Just something to think about.

Have fun,
skinny*k

Edit: Make that RAID 0 for speed, RAID 5 is good too, though.
Click to expand...

RAID 0 or 5 will increase sustained read and write speeds but random read and write speeds do not scale up like sustained speeds do. The whole point about SSDs is the extremely low latency and high random read and write performance. Those are what makes them feel so fast, not the sustained speeds. In everyday usage, you won't be doing much big reads or writes.

DannyBres said:
I plan to put in in my iMac in the spare SATA socket on the logicboard. Anyone know if they sell housing for latest iMacs yet?
Click to expand...

What housing? You don't need an enclosure to put the SSD in there.

What affects will this have on my apple care and warranty?
Click to expand...

Unless you damage something while doing it, your warranty should not be affected. However, it is recommended to put it back to its original state if it has to be sent to Apple.

I am very tempted by this! http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?imodule=CTFDDAC064MAG-1G1
Click to expand...

There isn't much point to pay the extra for SATA 6Gb/s SSD when your iMac has only SATA 3Gb/s. Supposedly, Intel is releasing new G3 SSDs on March 28th, those might be worth a look.
 
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