SSD speeds at what point does speed exceed any useful benefit.

[William Payne]

I have been looking at the best options to implement ssd's into my mac pro in a way where the speed benefit will be great and noticeable but not take up too much internal storage in the process.

i have looked at 2.5 ssd's from Angelbird, and their pcie m.2 adapter. I have looked at various other very super duper fast pcie based options that cost a lot of money and it raised a big question.

What really is slow?

SSD latency is already at a speed where for all real purposes it is not noticeable so now I looked into read/write speeds.

A 2.5 angelbird ssd at 564 MB/s read speeds. That means that it could read a 564 megabyte file in 1 second. Thats a pretty big file and that is pretty fast. I can't open my mouth that fast and I can talk fast.

Now if you are doing huge video files then yes those files can get huge and be a lot of data.

At 1 terabyte that would take about 30 minutes to be read at 564MB/s, if you had a 1000MB/s ssd then it would take 15 minutes.

So I began to look into extremes at what I would have to be doing to have a single 1 terabyte file and wanting to read it with a ssd at 564MB/s.

The answer was...... 1 terabyte of data would be equal to shooting a RED Weapon at 8k Full Format for 1 hour.

So I think for now I will look into using the Sonnet Tech pcie card adapters that allow the mounting of 1 or 2 2.5 ssd drives. I can't see myself needing faster then that for a while.

What have the rest of you found out while choosing ssd drives?

 

[William Payne]

Has anyone got any opinions on comparing the Samsung 850 pro 2.5 ssd's vs the Angelbird WRK 2.5 ssd?

 

[whwang]

I am looking for an SSD enclosure that can host at least 2TB of space and saturate TB2's bandwidth (better TB3). Does such a product exist?

 

[William Payne]

I am looking for an SSD enclosure that can host at least 2TB of space and saturate TB2's bandwidth (better TB3). Does such a product exist?

What kind of ssd? and how many drives?
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I am looking for an SSD enclosure that can host at least 2TB of space and saturate TB2's bandwidth (better TB3). Does such a product exist?

Here are some thunderbolt 3 external pcie enclosures.http://www.sonnettech.com/product/thunderbolt/index.html could you mount pcie ssd setups to something like this? I know sonnet sell adapters that are good for thunderbolt 2 not sure about 3.

Promise technology sell external thunderbolt 3 raid drives https://www.promise.com/Products/Pegasus/Pegasus3-Series but I don't know about ssd capabilities.

 

[A Hobo]

All of these 2.5 inch SSDs are limited to about 275mb in the classic Mac Pro. The sata ports are only Sata 2 which is 300MB/s

 

[William Payne]

All of these 2.5 inch SSDs are limited to about 275mb in the classic Mac Pro. The sata ports are only Sata 2 which is 300MB/s

Correct, which is why I am looking at PCIe mounts for sata ssd's

 

[Gav2k]

In every day use any ssd at sata 2 speeds or above will make a huge difference.

If your copying and editing massive files then yes more speed will always be better but when your going from a platter based drive to an ssd it'll always be night and day.

 

[BillyBobBongo]

Has anyone got any opinions on comparing the Samsung 850 pro 2.5 ssd's vs the Angelbird WRK 2.5 ssd?

I've got a 1TB Samsung EVO, not the pro, in my Mac Pro along with three 500 GB Angelbird's.

For now my drives use the SATA II ports as that is fast enough for what I do, visual design.

Both makes have the same read and write performance in macOS, however you have to enable TRIM through a terminal command for the Samsung, the Angelbird is seen as an Apple SSD and TRIM is enabled by default.

In Windows, which I use for gaming, I encountered many crashes when using the Samsung to host the OS. There was some software 'Samsung Magician' that was available that allowed me to optimize the disk for better performance, this resolved the crashing issues. My Angelbird disks do not require any optimization and just worked out of the box. I'm not a fan of having to use software like this.

i must admit that I suffered a moment of buyers remorse regarding the Samsung, but I've since decided to use if to host macOS and use the Angelbird for Windows.

Once again my experience is not with the pro version of Samsung's disk, but hopefully useful none the less.

 

[William Payne]

I've got a 1TB Samsung EVO, not the pro, in my Mac Pro along with three 500 GB Angelbird's.

For now my drives use the SATA II ports as that is fast enough for what I do, visual design.

Both makes have the same read and write performance in macOS, however you have to enable TRIM through a terminal command for the Samsung, the Angelbird is seen as an Apple SSD and TRIM is enabled by default.

In Windows, which I use for gaming, I encountered many crashes when using the Samsung to host the OS. There was some software 'Samsung Magician' that was available that allowed me to optimize the disk for better performance, this resolved the crashing issues. My Angelbird disks do not require any optimization and just worked out of the box.

i must admit that I suffered a moment of buyers remorse regarding the Samsung, but I've since decided to use if to host macOS and use the Angelbird for Windows.

Once again my experience is not with the pro version of Samsung's disk, but hopefully useful none the less.

Sounds like Angelbirds is the way to go, reliability is very important to me and it has to "Just work"

 

[orph]

@William Payne SSD speed for what task?
8k red raw video editing? you mention it but it's not clear if thats the use case.

any SSD is fine for daily task's (email/web/word etc) but if your making some kind of SSD raid setup for 8K video work thats different.

 

[jbarley]

I use 2 SamSung 850 evos mounted internally and configured in a raid0 setup in my macpro.
This sees daily service as both my startup OS and for my modest data storage needs.
I use the raid as a way to get close to SATA3 performance on the macpros SATA2 bus, all the while fully aware of the possible pitfalls with a raid setup, for which I maintain a strict backup routine.
This has served me well now for over a year without any issues.

 

[William Payne]

@William Payne SSD speed for what task?
8k red raw video editing? you mention it but it's not clear if thats the use case.

any SSD is fine for daily task's (email/web/word etc) but if your making some kind of SSD raid setup for 8K video work thats different.

No no im not doing any 8k stuff. I was just using that as an example to see how far I can scale down for my need.

 

[orph]

any normal SSD even with the macpro's limited sata 2 speed is super fast and much faster than a old spinner HD.
even a super cheep slow SSD will be much much much faster than a normal HD.

for normal use almost any 120GB+ drive will work well as a OS drive for osx (small can be a problem for fitting all your apps etc).
i have a evo 850 250 GB i think & tend to have about 60GB free space on it most the time but i have a lot of big apps etc..

if you have a 4.1/5.1 most people stick there SSD in the optical bay (mines in there lose)