What size SSD to get

[brianric]

I have a 2010 Mac Pro. I have a Sonnet Pro PCI express card arriving tomorrow, and plan on putting a Crucial 960 GB on it. I plan on adding a second SSD for the OS. My present boot drive takes 119 GB of room. Will a 256 GB SSD be sufficient, or should I go for a 512 GB SSD?

 

[Spacial]

Buy the largest you can afford. It's a general rule that's never gone out of date.

 

[VirtualRain]

buy the largest you can afford. It's a general rule that's never gone out of date.

+1

 

[paul-n]

usually another great old is to put the OS and applications on the fastest drive. Why don't use the 960 GB drive?

 

[krisosha]

usually another great old is to put the OS and applications on the fastest drive. Why don't use the 960 GB drive?

Not sure everyone has $800 lying around for JUST a hd.

240gb gives me enough for my os and heaps of apps, id do that and keep a mechanical hard drive for movies etc.

 

[brianric]

usually another great old is to put the OS and applications on the fastest drive. Why don't use the 960 GB drive?

I had planned on using it for Photoshop scratch drive and my working drive for my photo shoots.

 

[k-hawinkler]

I have a 2010 Mac Pro. I have a Sonnet Pro PCI express card arriving tomorrow, and plan on putting a Crucial 960 GB on it. I plan on adding a second SSD for the OS. My present boot drive takes 119 GB of room. Will a 256 GB SSD be sufficient, or should I go for a 512 GB SSD?

I am very happy with Crucial M4 and M500 and just upgraded a 512 GB SSD to a 960 GB in my 4 year old MacBook Pro. Also, I am using a RAID 0 consisting out of 4 Crucial 256 GB SSDs in an enclosure.

As each storage location can be written only a limited number of times, IIRC about 3000 times, it's important not to fill an SSD entirely, as then certain storage locations get rewritten excessively and wear out too fast. So, I never fill an SSD more than about half.

Relative to a harddisk an SSD runs very cool and puts less thermal stress on a system. Maxing out memory also avoids unnecessary writes.

I am doing quite a bit of post-processing of images, have several TB of photos. Having the images stored on an external device and not on the system SSD has given me quite a performance boost even for simple tasks such as deleting a bunch of images in the finder.

 

[brianric]

I am doing quite a bit of post-processing of images, have several TB of photos. Having the images stored on an external device and not on the system SSD has given me quite a performance boost even for simple tasks such as deleting a bunch of images in the finder.

External device would kill me, no thanks. My plans are to use the Crucial 960 GB as my temporary work area for photos, and hold off on the second SSD, as I'm giving the 240 GB OWC Mercury Accelsior PCI Express SSD one last try before exploring the second SSD.

 

[k-hawinkler]

External device would kill me, no thanks. My plans are to use the Crucial 960 GB as my temporary work area for photos, and hold off on the second SSD, as I'm giving the 240 GB OWC Mercury Accelsior PCI Express SSD one last try before exploring the second SSD.

Why?

 

[ender78]

I'd go 512. I find my 256 limting.

 

[Dennis187]

::::::::::::::::::::::> the better.. For me a 512GB at least suits my use best, for gaming etc.

 

[brianric]

Why?

Too damn slow. I'm dealing with 200 to 1,200 files at a time, with a mix of 12 MP and 36 MP cameras. I boot into Windows to sort by time if using more than one camera, then use Pixort to cull. Boot back into Mac side and use Lightroom for editing and Aperture for cropping. It's a lot faster using a SSD. When finished I tranfer final product to a hd on the Mac, and backup to one internal and three external drives, which are FW800 and USB2.