Comments on: I kissed a flash, and I liked it…

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 10:22:00 +0000

The only issue that would concern me in that case is, even on SATA v1, is it faster than the spinning drive? If yes then do it; if no then don’t. In any event I’d expect the drive to outlast the laptop both in terms of durability and usability anyway.

One minor niggle which I haven’t yet got to the bottom of is that some power setting is making sleep misbehave when on battery power. Instead of going over to “baleful glowing LED mode” the MBPro just turns the LED off altogether and needs the battery popping out to get it going again. This is very similar to the failure this model/revision of MBPro went through where the temperature management unit would go nuts, so I’m watching for signs and portents very carefully!

(still not a reason to avoid SSD upgrades, though…)

By: phil cheeseman

phil cheeseman — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:37:32 +0000

So the Macbook Pro is about two years old? about the same as mine which has a SATA (150mb/s) controller rather than the SATA II (300mb/s). So theoretically the read and write speeds are greater than the bandwidth available. Does anybody think this could be an issue in real world performance? Because I’m thinking of jumping on the SSD bandwagon and getting a OCZ Vertex.

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 09:25:55 +0000

(and as I do more research, I’ll wave the flag for the Real World approach again. I can find thousands of blogs repeating the assertion about slowdowns on JMicron based drives: but only a tiny number putting a quantifiable measurement to it – and those who do say it’s a few percent. Nobody at JMicron is making much of a comment – and as I have been saying from the start here, my device isn’t a single-volume flash drive, it’s a RAID0 – 120Gb presented as a mirrored volume of 60Gb. One explanation for the lack of small-file slowdown could be that the mirror controller fudges round it by reading the most available of the two mirrors, though again, I have no direct evidence – as distinct from indirect, blog-derived anecdote – that this is actually happening)

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:53:27 +0000

I’m testing from the point at which the Apple logo disappears, which is normally when you can hear the drive start jumping about.

- without SSD I’d say 30 seconds ish. That’s with the standard Apple mac Pro hard drive – 5400rpm, 120Gb 2.5 inch WD SATA with the sticker that alleges “apple firmware”…

- with SSD – slow count to three and it’s up. Next candidate machine is my old IBM Z series lappy, once I have saved up a few pennies, and that runs Vista Business, so then I can answer Buster’s questions too.

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:19:52 +0000

What was the boot time with the ssd? Compared with the normal hd.

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:19:01 +0000

So far I haven’t seen attributable delays in real use; however it would be something one would expect ot get worse over time, and while that clock is ticking, the R&D evidently continues, so I’m going to sit tight for at least the rest of this year.

By: Mr_Flynn

Mr_Flynn — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:58:43 +0000

A very interesting write-up on SSDs here:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
for those who haven’t already read it.

I’ve been tempted by SSDs.. I just have a couple of issues beside the price – namely the JMicron lag as mentioned above and lifespan… Hmm… tempting though…

By: Simon Blackwell

Simon Blackwell — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:00:30 +0000

The Apex drives are based on the JMicron controller which means you will probably experience random pauses when the drive is reading and writing small files.

This may seem like a minor issue but it becomes really really annoying especially when you consider the amount you have to pay for these things.

From what I have read the OCZ Vertex which is based on a different controller is a much better purchase and if you really have a lot of money to burn the Intel SSD’s are unbeatable for performance.

By: Steve Cassidy

Steve Cassidy — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:04:01 +0000

It’s a big topic, Buster. To do what you are describing with your desktop, you would very probably have to re-install Vista on the new drive, and that depends on the exact nature of your Vista licence.

Comparing performance is confusing, not just for the numbers etiher: that deadly phrase “up to” makes the whole business very hard to quantify.

Macs don’t do an automatic defrag, but thanks for the warning – the problem being, the warning about not using a defragger applies to the first flush of flash devices. I’m rather hoping my device is at least second-generation – but nobody’ss maaking clear marks between the 8MB (yes, MB) USB drive I bought back around 2001, and the 120Gb of memory in my MacBook Pro. Both get called “Flash Drives”, and I don’t think that’s very helpful…

By: Buster

Buster — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:54:35 +0000

Interesting, shame the SSD drive cost as much as a PC laptop. Most of us will have to go with a 30Gb SSD or wait a few more years. (30GB is big enough for those who don’t carry thousands of MP3’s?).

I’m finding the spec of a SSD compared to a normal hard drive is difficult to compare.
E.g. your new SSD :
Read: Up to 230MB/sec
Write: Up to 160MB/sec

and a typical mechanical laptop hard drive:

Western Digital 320GB 2.5″ Laptop Hard Drive SATAII 5400rpm 8MB Cache (www.ebuyer.com/product/136790)
Data Transfer Rate 300 MBps

Also I would like to know how to install a cheaper 30Gb SSD into my desktop and install Vista onto it, whilst still having my normal hard drive to store the bulk of the data that’s only occasionally needed. (my budget solution to increase the overall speed).

Ive never set up Vista onto a completely new hard drive, I hear Microsoft have some sort of ‘lock’ that stops people copying windows? Even when the new installation is for a new hard drive for the same computer. (Please correct me if wrong).

Thanks for taking the risk and testing your computer, so we dont have to risk ours.

P.S. I hope you have disabled the hard drive defragment tool (If the Mac does this), as I hear a defragment can damaged a SSD hard drive.