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

Would this SSD be a good choice for my Mini?

OCZ like other various SSD makers uses the Sandforce controller, which is known to carry problems (your mileage may vary). I'd personally go for the Crucial M4 128GB if it was you, that's the SSD I'll be grabbing.
 
FrozenShivers said:
OCZ like other various SSD makers uses the Sandforce controller, which is known to carry problems (your mileage may vary). I'd personally go for the Crucial M4 128GB if it was you, that's the SSD I'll be grabbing.
Click to expand...

The OCZ is used so that is why the price is $150

I can get the Crucial M4 from a local store for $200 +tax.
 
I would most definitely get the Vertex 3. If you want SATA II I'd prefer the intel x25-m G2 from personal experience.

FrozenShivers said:
OCZ like other various SSD makers uses the Sandforce controller, which is known to carry problems (your mileage may vary). I'd personally go for the Crucial M4 128GB if it was you, that's the SSD I'll be grabbing.
Click to expand...

And the Crucial doesn't? Search this forum for hundreds of issues encountered with Crucial drives. Mind you OCZ has unmatched customer support for their SSD range and constantly releases new firmware to enhance and fix issues on your drive based on complaints from users which intel and crucial fail to do. I should also tell you the SSD drive like the Vertex 3 offers one of the highest read/write speeds of around 500mb which is insane given your Mac supports SATA III.
 
I ended up going with the OCZ drive. I offered him $140 and he took it.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Legion93 said:
I would most definitely get the Vertex 3. If you want SATA II I'd prefer the intel x25-m G2 from personal experience.

FrozenShivers said:
OCZ like other various SSD makers uses the Sandforce controller, which is known to carry problems (your mileage may vary). I'd personally go for the Crucial M4 128GB if it was you, that's the SSD I'll be grabbing.
Click to expand...

And the Crucial doesn't? Search this forum for hundreds of issues encountered with Crucial drives. Mind you OCZ has unmatched customer support for their SSD range and constantly releases new firmware to enhance and fix issues on your drive based on complaints from users which intel and crucial fail to do. I should also tell you the SSD drive like the Vertex 3 offers one of the highest read/write speeds of around 500mb which is insane given your Mac supports SATA III.
Click to expand...

Those speeds are with compressed data. And it's proven that Crucial have lower failure rates than OCZ, that doesn't mean that noone will ever encounter problems, would have thought that was fairly obvious...

You seem to have taken my post as an attack. Guessing you have some unfounded bias.
 
FrozenShivers said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)



Those speeds are with compressed data. And it's proven that Crucial have lower failure rates than OCZ, that doesn't mean that noone will ever encounter problems, would have thought that was fairly obvious...

You seem to have taken my post as an attack. Guessing you have some unfounded bias.
Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong, I didn't mean to take a biased opinion sorry if my approach was one sided. every drive has problems to some extent, some major and some minor. I agree that failure rates for the OCZ was higher than Intel's and Crucial. However that's old news now - since Intel doesn't use their own controller on the 320 or 510 series a lot of people have encountered problems using it on OSX.

Crucial provides quality SSDs for great value and I love their support. I'm just saying if you want speed go for the Vertex 3, if you want reliability go for Crucial or OWC (which uses the sane controller as the Vertex). Besides the Sandforce controller has very aggressive garbage collection, this is where the Crucial's downside comes to - fast performance degradation. Whereas the M4 relies mostly on TRIM support, this is not prominent on other drives like the Vertex 3.
 
Legion93 said:
Don't get me wrong, I didn't mean to take a biased opinion sorry if my approach was one sided. every drive has problems to some extent, some major and some minor. I agree that failure rates for the OCZ was higher than Intel's and Crucial. However that's old news now - since Intel doesn't use their own controller on the 320 or 510 series a lot of people have encountered problems using it on OSX.
Click to expand...

Intel still uses their own controller for the 320 series, which basically makes it a slightly revamped version of the X-25M series. The 520 series uses the Marvell controller, which is the same controller Crucial uses. However, a small advantage those two drives have is that firmware updates are pushed OS Independent via CDs, where as with OCZ, etc you'd have to plug them into a Windows computer.
 
The garbage collection of the Sandforce 22xx series controllers should be a major consideration for long term usage, especially in OSX where Apple does not support TRIM on third party SSDs. Anandtech and diglloyd (macperformanceguide.com) reviews have demonstrated the durability of Sandforce based drives. Performance degradation is not an issue because of the solid garbage collection.

----------

Incompressible data rates are still near 500 MB/s read and 300 MB/s write.

OWC states:
479 MB/s
282 MB/s

Based on my experience testing these drives, OWC's assertions are good. The OCZ Vertex 3 and Vertex 3 MAX IOPs are considered to be faster than OWC's Mercury Extreme Pro 6G drives.
 
shortcut3d said:
The garbage collection of the Sandforce 22xx series controllers should be a major consideration for long term usage, especially in OSX where Apple does not support TRIM on third party SSDs. .... .
Click to expand...

Apple does not support it by default. It can be enabled however and work nicely, especially on Intel SSD's (I have tested that).

Only use the Grant Pannell method and use the script by Loeki https://github.com/lloeki/trim_patcher ( basically what this does is removes the identifier from the kext ) You'll have to repatch when you do an update of the OS.
 
I ran the Geek Bench test in 32bit mode before the SSD upgrade and then after the upgrade and my score did not increase. WTF?

Does the Geek Bench only test processor and memory speeds?

I scored a 5828
 
deafgoose said:
I ran the Geek Bench test in 32bit mode before the SSD upgrade and then after the upgrade and my score did not increase. WTF?

Does the Geek Bench only test processor and memory speeds?

I scored a 5828
Click to expand...

Geekbench only tests CPU and Memory. The amount of memory should not matter either, unless you are running too little to being with.
 
Ok, good to know. Thanks!

Here are the results from my x-bench test

benchmark.png
 
Last edited:
Legion93 said:
Don't get me wrong, I didn't mean to take a biased opinion sorry if my approach was one sided. every drive has problems to some extent, some major and some minor. I agree that failure rates for the OCZ was higher than Intel's and Crucial. However that's old news now - since Intel doesn't use their own controller on the 320 or 510 series a lot of people have encountered problems using it on OSX.

Crucial provides quality SSDs for great value and I love their support. I'm just saying if you want speed go for the Vertex 3, if you want reliability go for Crucial or OWC (which uses the sane controller as the Vertex). Besides the Sandforce controller has very aggressive garbage collection, this is where the Crucial's downside comes to - fast performance degradation. Whereas the M4 relies mostly on TRIM support, this is not prominent on other drives like the Vertex 3.
Click to expand...

No worries mate :)

Some good points too.
 
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