I have recently up graded the RAM in my Mac Pro from 6 to 10 gigs and am now thinking of adding a solid state drive to run the OS and apps from under the assumption that I will speed up the unit. I also have two 1TB drives for data and back up. Many of you know so much more than this old guy so comments please.
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updating my Mac Pro
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Adding an SSD can shorten the boot up time and make the system feel 'faster' if you reinstall OSX and your apps onto the SSD and run it off a PCIe card supporting SATA III, this is what I did. On your MP, if you connect the SSD to the onboard controller (and your SSD is SATA III) you wont get the full speed as the ports on logic board are only SATA II not SATA III, so it won't be much faster then your system is now.
An SSD is infinitely faster than an HDD on any link speed. A standard HDD can get close to 120MB/s on your Mac Pro. A SSD internally can get upwards of 280MB/s read and write. So over twice as fast. A 6G SSD can get to 580MB/s both ways.
The 4K and 256K r/w and cue depths are all over 10x improvements over HDD and again, link speed would not really matter, even SATAI would be an improvement. You'd be bottle necked on SATAI at roughly 160MB/s but 4K and 256K would be the same in performance as the 6G SATAIII link. Make sense?
The 4K and 256K r/w and cue depths are all over 10x improvements over HDD and again, link speed would not really matter, even SATAI would be an improvement. You'd be bottle necked on SATAI at roughly 160MB/s but 4K and 256K would be the same in performance as the 6G SATAIII link. Make sense?
I beg to disagree. I attached the SSD to one of the 'orphaned' SATA ports on the motherboard and to me the system has become significantly faster in general. While you may indeed experience a few more percent of transfer speed with SATA-III, the real (felt!) speed improvement lies in the quick search and access times of a SSD. And data transfer on SATA-II is no slouch either with up to 300MB/s compared to the 100-120MB/s you can get with traditional harddrives.
@OP: A migration to SSD will definitely improve your experience significantly! The SATA-III solution is a little faster, but also more expensive and imho not necessary if you are on a budget.
P.S.: If you feel the system speed did not increase as much as you expected from a SSD, try going back and boot/work from a conventional harddrive again. Then you'll appreciate the difference...
Edit: derbothaus beat me to it...
I'm preparing to eat my words about SSD benefits, as my first one arrives tomorrow. I'm busting my SSD cherry with a Crucial M4 256GB, and for now, it will swap out with my stock HDD in slot 1, which will become my new OS backup clone.
...If you feel the system speed did not increase as much as you expected from a SSD, try going back and boot/work from a conventional harddrive again. Then you'll appreciate the difference...
This should be framed and quoted on all "I beg to differ" SSD argument threads. Seriously, go back and see how you feel about it. Bet you get queasy.
Oh you will love it
Download the Blackmagic Disk Speed app from App Store and give me numbers
Oh you will love it
Crucial M4 256GB, firmware 309
Not too bad. I'm on the internal SATA II connection, so the read speed is pretty much topping out, I suppose. If I were to connect to a SATA III card via PCI, it would probably be closer to the 500MB/sec speed advertised for reads.
What is nice is the random 4k read/write speeds... 173.89MB/sec write, 19.15MB/sec read.
Sequential 4k read is 47.41MB/second.
This is from Xbench 1.3:
Sequential
Write 259.59 MB/sec 4K
Write 174.26 MB/sec 256K
Read 47.41 MB/sec 4K
Read 250.16 MB/sec 256K
Random
Write 173.89 MB/sec 4K
Write 216.79 MB/sec 256K
Read 19.15 MB/sec 4K
Read 195.47 MB/sec 256K
And Blackmagic's test:
