Successfully upgraded to a Corsair Force GT!

[Coolz]

Success story here:

Yesterday I took the plunge and installed a new Corsair Force GT 120 in my Hack to replace a WD Caviar Black 1 TB as the boot drive. I also installed a new WD Caviar Black 2 TB as the "User" drive to store pretty much everything except the OS and some select items (like a couple of work VMs).

I used Lx2Mac's guide to help me move my pre-existing 700GB \Users folder to my new drive! Big props to him!

I'm pleased with the upgrade - it's fast as hell and the whole thing went pretty smoothly. It doesn't benchmark quite as fast as the PR states - oh, well.

TRIM isn't enabled, but as I understand it the chipset in this drive handles garbage collection pretty well, please let me know if any of you think otherwise.

Marvell 88SE9128:

  Vendor:	Marvell
  Product:	88SE9128
  Link Speed:	6 Gigabit
  Negotiated Link Speed:	6 Gigabit
  Description:	AHCI Version 1.20 Supported

Corsair Force GT:

  Capacity:	120.03 GB (120,034,123,776 bytes)
  Model:	Corsair Force GT                        
  Revision:	1.300000
  Serial Number:	XXXX
  Native Command Queuing:	Yes
  Queue Depth:	32
  Removable Media:	No
  Detachable Drive:	No
  BSD Name:	disk2
  Medium Type:	Solid State
  TRIM Support:	No
  Partition Map Type:	GPT (GUID Partition Table)
  S.M.A.R.T. status:	Verified
  Volumes:
disk2s1:
  Capacity:	209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
  BSD Name:	disk2s1
  Content:	EFI
HackSSD:
  Capacity:	119.69 GB (119,690,149,888 bytes)
  Available:	31.07 GB (31,066,042,368 bytes)
  Writable:	Yes
  File System:	Journaled HFS+
  BSD Name:	disk2s2
  Mount Point:	/
  Content:	Apple_HFS

Thank you all!

- Coolz

 

[johnc28]

Congratulations on getting a new SSD! Those Force GT drives look great.

I love my SandForce drives.

What kind of benchmarks are you getting?

 

[Sartre]

OCZ contends that GC is not an acceptable substitute for TRIM and performance will degrade noticably unless you let the computer idle for long periods of time. Unless it's giving you problems, I would enable it. I have an OCZ Vertex2 but I haven't moved my OSX system onto it yet.

 

[Coolz]

What kind of benchmarks are you getting?

Here are my benchmarks, please let me know if you see any issues, thanks.

- Coolz

 

[Coolz]

OCZ contends that GC is not an acceptable substitute for TRIM and performance will degrade noticably unless you let the computer idle for long periods of time. Unless it's giving you problems, I would enable it. I have an OCZ Vertex2 but I haven't moved my OSX system onto it yet.

I just enabled TRIM following the instructions here: http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/

I'll let you know if I run into problems.

Thanks for your input!

- Coolz

 

[Coolz]

It seems that the main reason why my SSD isn't working at it's full potential is because of the built-in SATA 3.0 (Marvell) of my motherboard. Apparently it's a piece of crap. Ah well, it is still much, much faster than what I had.

 

[inertSpark]

Have you tried benchmarking the drive when connected to the Intel (blue) sata ports on your board? The reason I'm asking is that I've heard that SSDs won't kernel panic when connected to the Marvell ports (unline blue ray drives, which do), so I'm interested to see what kind of a difference there is given you say the Marvell is crap. I've been thinking about trying mine in there for a week or so.

 

[Coolz]

I haven't tried the other ports, and I'm not sure I will until I tear my box apart again. Right now it's very stable and I'd rather not push my luck!

Have you tried benchmarking the drive when connected to the Intel (blue) sata ports on your board? The reason I'm asking is that I've heard that SSDs won't kernel panic when connected to the Marvell ports (unline blue ray drives, which do), so I'm interested to see what kind of a difference there is given you say the Marvell is crap. I've been thinking about trying mine in there for a week or so.

 

[inertSpark]

Are you getting any Kernel Panics though? My experience with the Marvell ports hasnt been too great so far but if you're not not getting any panics then I might consider swapping my SSD into there.

 

[Coolz]

I use my Hack all day, every day and haven't experienced any KP's. Hope this doesn't jinx me...

Are you getting any Kernel Panics though? My experience with the Marvell ports hasnt been too great so far but if you're not not getting any panics then I might consider swapping my SSD into there.