Er, what? I do a lot of web browsing on my machine. I never wait on the storage device; my browser is loaded entirely into RAM, and never needs to access the HD (or if it ever does, it apparently does so in the background).
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The new Mac mini is almost certainly coming
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Er, what? I do a lot of web browsing on my machine. I never wait on the storage device; my browser is loaded entirely into RAM, and never needs to access the HD (or if it ever does, it apparently does so in the background).
I can also add that I prefer solid state to mechanical and transistors to tubes. 
So everything you access on the web, for each and every site you visit, is already in RAM in your machine? That's impressive. Most of us have to download content from web sites, and most of that downloaded content must be written..... somewhere.... like the browser cache.... which for me is located on my storage device....
I can also add that I prefer solid state to mechanical and transistors to tubes.
Cool!
Maybe I should be more explicit about my complaints here. I agree completely that an SSD is better than an HD. In practically every way. But, it is more expensive than an HD. And so, I want to quantify how much better it is than an HD. For some purposes, I find SSDs worth the price. For others, I do not.
For me, an SSD is not something I buy to make me "feel good." It is a tool to get a job done. If it does the job sufficiently better than an HD, it is worth the extra price. If it doesn't, then it isn't worth the extra price. And, I would argue, there are situations where it is not worth the price.
That's all I'm trying to say here. SSDs are not mana from heaven. They are tools, like any other. I'm just tired of so much uncritical praise for a particular piece of hardware...
In our use case, adding an external SSD to my husband's iMac turned it from "why is this thing so bloody slow" to "whoa... actually maybe I don't need a new computer now". In particular app loading time seems to be 10-15x faster, and his Windows VM has improved so much he keeps on commenting on how much nicer it is.
The alternative, because it's an iMac with maxed RAM, would be to buy a new machine or build a Hackintosh, both of which would cost waaaaaay more than that SSD + Thunderbolt enclosure. (I'm a bit pissed off tbh because I wanted to give him my Hackintosh and get myself a 4% faster one with all the latest components )
The alternative, because it's an iMac with maxed RAM, would be to buy a new machine or build a Hackintosh, both of which would cost waaaaaay more than that SSD + Thunderbolt enclosure. (I'm a bit pissed off tbh because I wanted to give him my Hackintosh and get myself a 4% faster one with all the latest components
)For the record, I don't think SSDs are the answer to all of life's computer problems. In fact, my desktop machine has an SSD internally for the OS and my program files, but I have a 5 TB spinner attached for storing documents, my iTunes library, backup copes of my documents, etc. Why? Because 5 TB of external hard drive is much cheaper than the same amount of SSD and I don't need an SSD to serve up my tv shows from my iTunes library. Each has its place.
Nope, it's out there on the web.
Aha! Perhaps you don't know this, but in the past decade or so, all the modern popular operating systems (Linux, Windows, and yes, OS X) now perform "disk caching"; that is, they use all available "unallocated RAM" to cache all disk I/O. Therefore, if you have sufficient RAM, once you read some data off the disk, that data will remain in RAM. And, if you write some data to the disk, that data will first be written to the RAM cache, allowing the app to immediately go on with life. As time permits, that cache will be streamed to the storage device in the background.
So no, my browser never waits on the HD, other than when it loads a file for the first time. It never waits at all for writes.
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In our use case, adding an external SSD to my husband's iMac turned it from "why is this thing so bloody slow" to "whoa... actually maybe I don't need a new computer now". In particular app loading time seems to be 10-15x faster, and his Windows VM has improved so much he keeps on commenting on how much nicer it is.
The alternative, because it's an iMac with maxed RAM, would be to buy a new machine or build a Hackintosh, both of which would cost waaaaaay more than that SSD + Thunderbolt enclosure. (I'm a bit pissed off tbh because I wanted to give him my Hackintosh and get myself a 4% faster one with all the latest components
Thank you! This is what I want to see -- a justification that you are actually getting your money's worth out of your SSD purchase, something more than just "I feel good now that I bought it".
There's a lot of people on this forum who just seem to think the thing is some magical panacea...Nope, it's out there on the web.
Aha! Perhaps you don't know this, but in the past decade or so, all the modern popular operating systems (Linux, Windows, and yes, OS X) now perform "disk caching"; that is, they use all available "unallocated RAM" to cache all disk I/O. Therefore, if you have sufficient RAM, once you read some data off the disk, that data will remain in RAM. And, if you write some data to the disk, that data will first be written to the RAM cache, allowing the app to immediately go on with life. As time permits, that cache will be streamed to the storage device in the background.
So no, my browser never waits on the HD, other than when it loads a file for the first time. It never waits at all for writes.
I assure you, I understand how an operating system works. Please share with the group how I can put 32 GB of RAM in a 2011 Mac mini so it doesn't have to use the disk. Also give me a cost analysis between doing that versus spending $150 on an SSD.
Wow, does your browser really need to cache that much data? (How does it even run in the first place?)
Look, I'm not trying to pick on you here. I'm just awfully tired of people pointing to an SSD and saying, "There! That one device makes my unusably slow Mac usably fast!" An SSD is a wonderful device. But it is not everything.
I'm happy we had this little talk. Holy crap, my twitter feed says Donald Trumo is President now....I gotta go.
What I'm tired of is your insistence to the contrary. You say you come from the PC world. I've been in that world, I'm back in that world now. You can interchange many parts of a PC anytime you want to make something perform better. Need better faster video? Replace the video card. Need to do more stuff? Install more RAM. Need to do it faster? Upgrade the processor.
You *cannot* do any of those things with a Mac, at least not without great difficulty. Particularly a Mac mini. The memory is soldered to the board. The processor is soldered to the board. The video is soldered to the board. Even the storage is soldered to the board now in some of the Macs.
What you can do to breathe new life into an aging Mac mini is to replace the hard drive with an SSD. That is the point we are all trying to make and you don't seem to want to hear. At this point, all we are doing now is arguing in circles, and I've got way more pleasant things to do than that.
Although I did prefer my Macintosh amplifier to my Harman Kardon.
I liked my Dynaco amp because I put it together myself, so I could change out any part, even though they were soldered in.
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Circles are terrible! Why would anyone want a circle when you can have an elipse?
Well, yeah, that is the point I'm trying to quantify here. Does it really breathe new life into an aging Mac?
In my case, I just don't do a lot of constant swapping to my storage device. So, for me, the only significant benefits of an SSD would be boot-up time and application loading time. The rest of the time I spend on the device, I'm using my apps, and not using the HD. At most, I stream media files to iTunes, something where an SSD does not provide any improvement in performance.
For me, an SSD does not breathe a whole lot of new life into an aging Mac. That's why I feel people should quantify how much money that "new life" is worth before getting an SSD.
Bottom line is that some people don't notice or care and some do. It's how the world works.
It makes it boot faster from the increasingly common and increasingly mystifying crashes.
I'd like to have my programmer's switch back, please.
All of those, plus QUIET.
It's the single biggest hope at making an older computer usable. The alternative is to just buy a new computer anyways. I wouldn't be able to tolerate my 2010 17" MBP with a spinner as it was very slow in everyday use. Now with an SSD, it's fantastic.
I think it's fair to say that storage speed has been the single greatest performance increasing in desktop computing in the past decade.
My parents have an HP with i7 4790K and 12GB of RAM... but using it is painfully slow because of the HDD. It feels much slower than a desktop I have from 2007 that has an SSD (Q6600 4GB RAM).
Bottom line: New computer with HDD feels slow. Older computer with SSD can feel fast (for normal tasks).
Also, web browsers use the drive all the time as they store and recall data from web pages (cache/cookies). An SSD absolutely makes a difference to web browsing.
I've gotta disagree on this. I think the GPU, hands down, has provided the greatest increase in performance w.r.t. desktop computing over the last decade.
An SSD is, in essence, a type of non-volatile RAM. It is not a replacement for normal (volatile) RAM, because it is significantly slower. So, although it is an improvement on platter-based storage, it cannot provide any new functionality.
GPUs, on the other hand, can now drive vastly more pixel data than before, perform 3-D calculations, manage multiple screens, and now are starting to enter the realm of VR.
I don't know about your "feelings." I can't quantify them, nor put a dollar value on them. But, an older computer with a GPU upgrade can do things it never had the power for before. (I've recently put a cheap GeForce GT730 into an old Gateway tower with a 1.87 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU. The machine is years older than my 2010 Mini, but can now run recent software titles that the 2010 will never be able to, as well as driving more monitors better than it can. It cost far less than an SSD would, and provided a much bigger impact than an SSD could.)
I realize that Apple machines are designed specifically to deny users the ability to upgrade them. I guess all I'm trying to say here is that an SSD is not a gift from God; it provides a specific improvement to a specific subsystem of a computer. If all you want is to feel better, then hey, go for it. If you want to accomplish a particular task more efficiently, however, that is something you can quantify...
Yes! Web browsers do cache data. This allows them to read data from your storage device rather than pull it down over the web, which is indeed much faster.
However, let me again mention something I noted in an earlier post: all modern operating systems perform something called "file system caching", which means that they use all available RAM not already allocated to other tasks to store all I/O to and from your storage device. So, if your browser needs to read from its cache/cookies, it only hits the storage drive the first time; every subsequent read will hit the cache, and never even touch the drive. And, if your browser needs to write, it never hits the drive at all. The write goes into the OS cache, which is subsequently spooled to the drive in the background. The browser can continue on with life without knowing any of this.
Therefore, the only time a browser gets a significant boost from an SSD, is when your machine has run completely out of RAM and is forced to start using the storage device as if it was RAM. The SSD makes this process less painful than an HD does, but it is still painful; if you can arrange things such that your machine doesn't run out of RAM (that is, keep fewer memory-intensive apps open, or provide your machine with sufficient RAM so that it doesn't run out), the machine will run much faster no matter what kind of storage device is in use.
An SSD is much more than "just another tool". It's freedom from waiting. Waiting for everything. Subtracting just one second from any operation means less stress. Waiting is stress. Every time a folder is opened, that's coming off the HD. If it's a 5400 rpm spinner, you'll wait a little longer before you see the contents.
I've mentioned this before, but those who argue that a SSD isn't that big of a deal really haven't used one. It's a fundamental computing difference slapping a SSD into a computer. You'll NEVER want to go back to the dark days of a spinning boot drive ever again. It's just too painful.
There. I just quantified it.
I've mentioned this before, but those who argue that a SSD isn't that big of a deal really haven't used one. It's a fundamental computing difference slapping a SSD into a computer. You'll NEVER want to go back to the dark days of a spinning boot drive ever again. It's just too painful.
There. I just quantified it.
Amen. Thank you for your eloquence. No one ever went back to 2400 baud modem, did they? NO THEY DID NOT! Because waiting SUCKS SO HARD.
Discussion about ssd is nonsense, if anybody says that ssd does not make difference, he/she must be either trolling or never used ssd equiped computer. Man, ssds are the last biggest computer innovation for casual/ordinary users...
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Regarding the SSD, it really all comes down to how you use your computer.
I bounce between a lot of different apps. And I don't keep apps open if I'm not using them.
So app loading time is aggravatingly slow to me with standard 5400 rpm spinning drives.
It's tolerable on 7200 rpm drives. Not bad on 10K rpm drives.
But instant on SSD drives.
With the way I use computer apps, I used to spend a lot of time just waiting for stuff to launch.
I had a friend bring their newer 2012 MacBook Pro over for me to do some stuff for them. And although it should perform better than my computer, it actually felt like it was locked up because I was constantly waiting on it. Even to open things in the system preferences. And that was a fresh install.
The difference, was that they had Apple's standard 5400 rpm spinner in there.
If you only use a few apps, and you leave them open, then perhaps it's less noticeable.
But I do a lot of different tasks on my computer. Everything from video production and encoding, to music recording, to managing terabytes of legal documents and images, to simple word processing, emailing, virtual machines, remote network management, and iTunes streaming to my tv's. And I'm sure I'm omitting numerous other tasks.
So I use a ton of apps.
I boot and store apps on the SSD drive. All data and files and projects are on 7200 rpm or faster spinners.
I bounce between a lot of different apps. And I don't keep apps open if I'm not using them.
So app loading time is aggravatingly slow to me with standard 5400 rpm spinning drives.
It's tolerable on 7200 rpm drives. Not bad on 10K rpm drives.
But instant on SSD drives.
With the way I use computer apps, I used to spend a lot of time just waiting for stuff to launch.
I had a friend bring their newer 2012 MacBook Pro over for me to do some stuff for them. And although it should perform better than my computer, it actually felt like it was locked up because I was constantly waiting on it. Even to open things in the system preferences. And that was a fresh install.
The difference, was that they had Apple's standard 5400 rpm spinner in there.
If you only use a few apps, and you leave them open, then perhaps it's less noticeable.
But I do a lot of different tasks on my computer. Everything from video production and encoding, to music recording, to managing terabytes of legal documents and images, to simple word processing, emailing, virtual machines, remote network management, and iTunes streaming to my tv's. And I'm sure I'm omitting numerous other tasks.
So I use a ton of apps.
I boot and store apps on the SSD drive. All data and files and projects are on 7200 rpm or faster spinners.