Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

What to put on SSD

honeycombz said:
Ok, so for starters I'm gonna get the Apricorn velocity solo just the x1 and will just use the SSD for the system. Originally I was looking at 500gb-1tb SSD but they are pricey and since I am only going to use it for the boot system maybe a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-75E250B/AM) for under $100 would be goo enough?? :) If so, how would I go about redirecting my user folder to the old spinner drive? And if I do this, and leave the old system on my old spinner drive... will I still be able to boot into that no problem or will it mess everything up... and also, since just the system should supposedly be on the SSD, do I just continue backing up the old spinner and not worry about backing up the system drive?
Click to expand...

128GB $65 is 'enough' for most to use for system.

Leave the /Users/my-home-account-name/Library

on the system drive, just skip the other folders when you use Carbon Copy Cloner

And do make either a sparse disk image or use a small 100-200GB partition somewhere, can even be on TimeMachine (not great but handy) or any other drive with 200GB storage to spare.
 
As I changed to a Macbook Air with SSD I faced the same questions...but it ended up to be quite easy. Music is uploaded to iTunes Match and now is being being streamed, same for movies once purchased. Meanwhile I only rent them on e.g. Amazon Prime. Photos were also uploaded to the cloud, same for documents. That said, my SSD drive only houses the OS, my programs and non permanent stuff...but everything backed up on Time Capsule as well which also acts as my wireless base station.
 
I was considering leaving Applications as well. Is this not doable? I've been keeping my Applications in the root Applications directory not the Users home Applications folder? And how do I point the cloned system to the old users drive? Sorry if this is complicated but it's a natural progression of a very helpful thread. Should I not have my applications where I do?
 
I'd go with 250; 128 gets filled pretty quick if you are not very careful. I managed for awhile, but got tired of thinking about it, got a 250, and now don't have any worries.

My life is bliss. ;)
 
honeycombz said:
I was considering leaving Applications as well. Is this not doable? I've been keeping my Applications in the root Applications directory not the Users home Applications folder? And how do I point the cloned system to the old users drive? Sorry if this is complicated but it's a natural progression of a very helpful thread. Should I not have my applications where I do?
Click to expand...
"Boot drive" might also be said to be "OS/Apps"
Applications should also go with default system (unless maybe a 60GB full X-Plane suite or something). Tried to see with a pair of Cheetah 15K drives and putting 3rd party apps on 2nd Cheetah did not help, nor did using them in RAID0 either (and I feel the same way about SSDs now, unless you need the capacity only)

I was not saying to use or put the user home folder on another drive, because you can always use the simple User Accounts control panel to do so though it is now made very simple. And linkng with alias and application preferences makes it easy though iTunes and iPhoto and others already allow changing the location in preferences or by opening the library from its alternate locations.

I meantion 128GB because I never had a system larger than 40GB on my Mac Pro 1,1 so I could put some user folders there.

I think Downloads is one place where I wish OS X would be more flexible in location than either home folder or not.
 
Ugh... Ok, well if i have to put the applications with the system, then i guess i am gonna need a bigger drive because i got about 230gb of applications... How big is the system, and how much free space is good to have on the SSD. I just deleted 20 gigs of apps but i guess i could delete more. Some of these are games actually, and i do have an x plane demo install lol... Maybe i should leave the games elsewhere or delete some. I suppose i have played call of duty 4 enough already... Guess i will go try to delete moreo stuff. UGH. So do all you keep your applications in the user application folder or the main application folder?

Ok, here's the latest:

Total HD files 921.55 GB
Users folder 628.72 GB
Difference is 294.53 GB

So, I can try to keep discarding applications and games to get below 250 GB or I should just commit to a 500 GB SSD... or you guys have ideas.
 
Last edited:
Part of the advantage of using SSD's is so that the system and applications get a performance boost from the increased speed. I wouldn't put my applications on a slower drive. Just get a drive that's big enough to handle your needs.
 
Sounds good, so do you think 500gb would be enough or would I want more free space for best performance?
 
honeycombz said:
Sounds good, so do you think 500gb would be enough or would I want more free space for best performance?
Click to expand...
If you have programs that use the boot drive for cache like some plug-ins do regardless of any preference setting for primary scratch is, or if they use scratch and you want to use the fastest media.

Lots of writes of temp files and cache can change just how much free space to plan for.

Take the nMP. Previously people with 4,1/5,1 would try to do everything possible using SATA III controller(s) to optimize performance; to use a scratch volume or array; to put their Aperture or Lightroom on an SSD.
However the blade made all of that mute. There was/is enough improved bandwidth between PCIe-Express SSDs and memory as well to get data into and back out from processors. One of the advantages of super fast SSD interface.
Only roadblock is PCIe 2.x on cMP systems. People tried using two SATA III controllers with 2 or 4 SSDs trying to get 1800MB/sec, which is now only slightly better than the newest XP951 or whatever Intel and Samsung have up their sleeve and latest design revision Apple is using in the 6,1.

Being able to throw everything, the kitchen sink, the whole enchilada - and not worry about having to optimize storage.

Even with SSDs I never changed though in aiming for free space on boot drive to have more than enough, just that now there are large NAND pages some of which are used and in order for background garbage collection and TRIM to work freely, it still needs to do its own marking cells and pages as used and free and 40% may sound extreme given price per GB but that is what I do.
 
Thanks guys! Hopefully my spinner doesn't die on me before getting this all setup. Think I'm gonna bump my ram up from 12gb to 16gb too while I'm at it.
 
Now that Apple has updated for TRIM support on 3rd Party SSDs how concerned should I be about TRIM bugs and how do I know if my drive is susceptible to this?
 
honeycombz said:
Now that Apple has updated for TRIM support on 3rd Party SSDs how concerned should I be about TRIM bugs and how do I know if my drive is susceptible to this?
Click to expand...

There's no need to worry at all provided you're buying a new SSD from a major MFG. OS X Trim is sequential. Queued trim is the current dog and it only shows it's head in Linux.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back