To SSD or not to SSD?

[VeX]

the 520 is too expensive.

It is like intel prices it that way on purpose, just to be dicks cause you know they don't care if you buy it or not. They'll be around forever.

There's always that "price to pay" when you're an early adopter of technology, they (the manufacturers) have to recover R&D costs.

While SSDs have been around for a few years, the higher capacity ones haven't.. hence the price.

...like I said earlier in this thread - I'm good with my 75 dollar 512 GB HDDs

Don't get me wrong.. I can't wait for those prices to come down.. I want a few of those!

 

[coelo]

There's always that "price to pay" when you're an early adopter of technology, they (the manufacturers) have to recover R&D costs.

While SSDs have been around for a few years, the higher capacity ones haven't.. hence the price.

...like I said earlier in this thread - I'm good with my 75 dollar 512 GB HDDs

Don't get me wrong.. I can't wait for those prices to come down.. I want a few of those!

yeah, I think that is the majority opinion although it may be the minority opinion in this thread. I did bite the bullet and jumped on the 256GB Samsung 830, 2 drives cost me about $370 from Tiger direct. So, I have 512MB of SSD for $370 compared to $550 which is what they want for the 512GB drive.

 

[zonar1982]

I got a 64gb samsung 830 a couple of weeks ago.

I moved my home folder to a normal HD. Only put the system and apps on the ssd. The performance gain was okay but it could have been better I think.
It appears there is a lot of stuff in the homefolder OSX needs to access frequently. Like fonts and such.

Keep it in mind...

 

[kiyyto]

omg, the samsung 256GB 830 is $159 now.
that didn't take long at all. By christmas it might be $99

 

[NoCoErik]

Ok. So I'm building my 1st Hackintosh and am building it on paper first. An important element is SSD or not. Yep. Read this whole thread AND the thread http://www.tonymacx86.com/buying-advice/59032-beginners-guide-choosing-solid-state-drive-ssd-5.html

I have a question as to HOW SSD are best used. Let's assume I get a Samsung 830 Series 256GB drive and it plays nice. I'm building a media editing machine (tons of RAW stills and full HD video) so this is a work machine. Single system boot: Mac OS all the way, likely ML.

The punchline question... will an SSD make my workflow any faster? Below is my noobie imagining of how it *might* work. Please, tell me if I'm right, or if I'm waay off base.

A lot of folks are putting SSD drives in so that "It makes the computer boot up so fast!"

To that I say, whoop-de-do. So what. I can wait an extra 45 seconds for the once every two months I have to reboot (more with a Hackintosh?). That is pointless to me. And I don't need my internet browser to pop up instantaneously either. I can wait that grueling 1/2 second and save about $200.

Here's where I think it MIGHT be a real advantage. Say I have the SSD as boot disk. Then suppose I download 90 GB of high resolution still photos to that SSD. Then I launch my RAW processor (Adobe Lightroom) and import those 3,000 photos into Lightroom. It renders previews, I apply settings to them, rename files, save metadata to them, then process them out to 1000 pixels-wide jpeg proofs and then apply a Photoshop watermark automated action to each of those jpeg files. Once that is done, I'd move ALL the files, RAW and jpegs to a secondary disk, RAID 1, and clear off the SSD for the next task.

Since all of that data was on SSD during all the rendering, processing, and Photoshop actions… would I realize that benefit of access time of 6x? 10x? or so and would that translate into significantly faster processing times?

If it doesn't … for me, there is so very little cost to benefit for SSD that I'll just pass it up and put in a Caviar Black 1TB HDD.

Lingering Questions:
I've heard that once a drive starts to fill up it starts to slow down. Is this just a bench test "slow down" or will I feel it in real world?

Word is that with non-compressable data, SSDs are much slower, as part of the magic seems to be that they compress/decompress data as they write and read it -- thus adding to the magic. And if one STARTS with pre-compressed data (like photos) then speed drops even farther. True? Real world pain?

Add to that the fact that SSD's theoretically wear out faster with read/write -- should I even be thinking of an SSD as a write disk at all?

Thanks. Some day hopefully I'll build enough knowledge to answer questions, not just ask them.

 

[NoCoErik]

If someone is reading this thread through… I did some more research to my questions and here's my conclusions (which could be wrong, but it's what I found)…

No. SSD for me will NOT be a great solution. Why?

The ideal application seems to be running the boot disk and application software on an SSD. Though some read/write times may be faster than a regular HDD, it's the fact that I need to do a LOT of read/write, read/write, etc. to this. The repeated cycles of read/write will likely tend to both slow performance to the drive AND lead to its early demise, since there is a limited number of times each gate can be used before it burns out.

My needs will likely be better served by a dedicated boot & application drive (which may or may not be SSD) and a combination of RAM disk and RAID.

So for me… small SSD if any and minimal read/write.

 

[Zer0d3gree]

SSD is the best choice to optimize and speed up your computer. [FONT=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]It makes your computer faster because it has faster read and write times(because there is no moving parts, etc.). for example, my Crucial m4 has sequential read of up to 500MB/s and a write up to 175MB/s. the sequential read allows for relative instantaneous response in opening programs and processing files. In comparrison, my WD Black has a sequential read of 109MB/s and a sequential right write of 106MB/s. SSD's will also last long and provide noticeable instant speed increase.[/FONT]

 

[YYR123]

o yeah......Was not impressed with my Samsung 840 Pro 128gb on my Mac Pro 3.1

but inside my hack on a Sata 3 connection and I can boot in 3 seconds.....Literally....3 seconds on the apple grey screen and then desktop......its radical.

 

[zaptoons]

If I can help it, I never want to touch a system again without a decent SSD boot drive, if only for the boot times alone. Now when I boot a machine with a standard hard drive it feels to me like something is wrong. So 'yes' to SSD, as long as it's a decent brand (I'll never touch an OCZ again after 4 replacements have gone belly up on me) and as long as it's a fast 6GB/s connection.

 

[davevegas]

I agree, SSD's are gold for the Bootsystem but it's way to expensive for anything more than that.