SOLVED - NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

[ggeorge]

Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

Wait so what you're saying is having the mSATA for booting and another SSD for storing my video editing files? that's hard for me since it's a bit too expensive and well ML (if i will use ML) is 4gb and all my media programs and such are all about 25gb so i don't think i need 2 64gb SSD's
Here's the Question 1 large 64G SSD (if so mSATA or Normal) for both booting + files or two smaller SSD's (capacity ideas?) one mSATA for booting and normal for files

Actually, I believe that the mSata is intended for use as essentially a flash cache for a conventional HDD, so that they act as a single drive with frequently used files stored on the mSata drive for greater speed. Which I believe requires drivers that don't exist for OSX.

You can probably use it as a boot drive, but it will have no advantages over a conventional SSD aside from taking up less space in your case, which usually isn't an issue.

With SSDs larger is essentially always better if for no other reason than the speed of an SSD is related to the # of flash memory chips and thus more storage = more chips. So larger drives almost always offer better performance than their smaller brothers.

Ok so you recommend using a discrete graphics card rather than the intel hd4000 is better/faster, and let's say if anything happens to the graphics card i'll have the hd4k as a backup?

Sorry for the trouble

The intel HD4000 is not actually currently supported in OSX AFAIK and probably won't be until new iMacs get released and/or ML/10.7.5. So you would need one anyway, though ML is probably getting released in about a week. So you might just want to wait until the 25th to see what happens.

The HD4000 doesn't suck nearly as much as older integrated graphics, but is still blown away by a decent graphics card. Also AFAIK they can't be used for GPU acceleration. The HD4000 is terrific for video transcoding, but that depends on Intel's quicksync, which doesn't function under OSX.

 

[Solidww]

Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

Wow, a lot of the reasons for new hardware doesn't work.

Yes, mSata is basically for cache in Windows. This isn't so in OSX; it will just be another drive.

HD 3000&4000 won't be as good as a Discrete Card. Just decide how intense your work load will be and buy accordingly. I seriously doubt you will need more then a GTX285 or GTX460.

Use a drive that your okay with to boot and run programs. Then use your other fast drives as media and scratch drives. Good luck.

 

[YK97]

Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

Use a drive that your okay with to boot and run programs. Then use your other fast drives as media and scratch drives. Good luck.

ok so what exactly do you mean run programs

you mean i install the program on that drive so it opens from it? and a question if the program is on the SSD (let's call it A) and the file that opens with the program is on a normal HDD (let's call it B) will opening a file from B from a program on A make opening and loading files really slow?

 

[ggeorge]

Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

ok so what exactly do you mean run programs. You mean i install the program on that drive so it opens from it?

Install to. Since that is where they are located you "run" them from that drive.

and a question if the program is on the SSD (let's call it A) and the file that opens with the program is on a normal HDD (let's call it B) will opening a file from B from a program on A make opening and loading files really slow?

The program would load based on the speed of the drive you installed it to and the files would open based on the speed of the drives they are located on.

Having the program located on a faster drive won't magically make the files open faster, nor will files on slow drives make the program load slower.

 

[apexonephoto]

Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

Being a complete noob (and not much further on now), I bought the mSata SSD back in December/January. It can be used for an OS, and I have had Lion and W7 both installed on mine. I currently have W7 on mine. Very fast boot times in both OS's. If you didn't use it and just had two SSD's for dual booting I don't think you could tell the difference.

This is my complete build: http://www.tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=54&t=43360

 

[Solidww]

Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

ggeorge, said it perfectly.

 

[YK97]

Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

ggeorge, said it perfectly.

yea, i think i got the picture so it doesn't matter that much but it's preferable to put it on the mSATA because i read somewhere it's faster.

Thanks Everyone

 

[ggeorge]

Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

ggeorge, said it perfectly.

yea, i think i got the picture so it doesn't matter that much but it's preferable to put it on the mSATA because i read somewhere it's faster.

Thanks Everyone

mSATA is not faster in and of it's self, it's just a different form factor/connector. In most of the boards that I've seen with this feature, you'll notice it tells you that if you use the mSATA connector, you won't be able to use one of the regular SATA ports and that's because you are using that SATA controller channel for the mSATA rather than a regular SATA port.

What IS faster about them is that the mSATA drives are all SSDs, which are faster than regular HDDs, but they are no faster than a comparable SSD (there are obviously performance differences between various SSDs).

 

[YK97]

Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

mSATA is not faster in and of it's self, it's just a different form factor/connector. In most of the boards that I've seen with this feature, you'll notice it tells you that if you use the mSATA connector, you won't be able to use one of the regular SATA ports and that's because you are using that SATA controller channel for the mSATA rather than a regular SATA port.

What IS faster about them is that the mSATA drives are all SSDs, which are faster than regular HDDs, but they are no faster than a comparable SSD (there are obviously performance differences between various SSDs).

wow, that comment really made me think, hmm so what your saying is that the mSATA connector itself not faster it's just that mSATA's are SSD's which are faster than the normal HDD so basically if i get a 6 gb/s SSD say.. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148441 with higher preformance (Sustained Sequential Read/write....etc.) than the m SATA 3gb/s http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820211581 it would be much faster and not to be rude but on what basis are you saying all these things because in another thread a man with an mSATA and a normal SSD said the mSATA was way faster (although he had not activated TRIM)

 

[ggeorge]

Re: NOOB: Graphics Card & mSata advice

wow, that comment really made me think, hmm so what your saying is that the mSATA connector itself not faster it's just that mSATA's are SSD's which are faster than the normal HDD so basically if i get a 6 gb/s SSD say.. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148441 with higher preformance (Sustained Sequential Read/write....etc.) than the m SATA 3gb/s http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820211581 it would be much faster

Some SSDs are faster than others, obviously a 6Gb sata is going to be faster than a 3Gb sata. Most of the drives out there are sandforce based, those use data compression to improve their performance, which means they are wicked fast at tasks that involve compressible data, but suffer when dealing with incompressible data (compressed video for example). Samsung's 830 series is considered tops overall for this reason and the Crucial M series are also considered to be over all superior to the sandforce drives.

and not to be rude but on what basis are you saying all these things because in another thread a man with an mSATA and a normal SSD said the mSATA was way faster (although he had not activated TRIM)

Without knowing what exactly this guy was comparing I can't really give you a full explanation. It could be he had a slow regular SSD and a fast mSATA drive, perhaps he was using highly compressed files wt a Sandforce SSD and a non-sandforce mSATA ssd. Perhaps it was a specialized MB/mSATA, but AFAIK there is nothing inherently special about an mSATA connection.

Tops in speed in any case are the PCIe based drives like OWC's Accelsior
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe ... lsior/RAID

They aren't limited by having to go through an interface that was designed with conventional HDDs in mind. The higher end ones ($$$$$) can have throughput in the thousands of gigabytes per second.

TRIM doesn't make a drive faster, it just prevents it from loosing performance over time which happens for a number of complicated reasons.