To SSD or not to SSD?

[Niggly]

I got 2 x 250 gig standard 840 drives on an Apricorn controller (Mac Pro 4,1) and although not 3 seconds, I'm still more than happy with the performance.

Also, a PC with 4 different SSD's . . . after a decent graphics card I would say the most important upgrade for any system.


Nige

 

[zaptoons]

I also find an SSD as a dedicated scratch/render disk for apps like Photoshop, Final Cut, Premiere, etc. definitely speed things up.

 

[montanamike]

OK,

I agree with you now.
My first SSD was an OCZ Vertex 4 and yes it was faster, but I didn't think that much of it.

Tried again with a Samsung 830 and after using it for three days I can tell you I don't want to go back to HDD for my main drive.

I love My ssd's have them in 3 Mac/hacks. Though price was hard to swallow...

 

[enrobriaffej]

I have a Crucial m4 (64Gb), samsung 840 pro (256Gb) and Sandisk ultra plus (256Gb), with plans for a couple more.

 

[geminii]

With prices coming down a bit, I'm still on the fence. Is it worth it to get a hybrid-ssd? I mainly do video editing and 3d rendering with Final Cut Pro and DAZ 3D. It seems in most of my research SSD only really improves application opening and booting up. Rendering seems to be more on the processor, gpu and memory. Thoughts?

 

[datsafail]

I have a Crucial m4 (64Gb), samsung 840 pro (256Gb) and Sandisk ultra plus (256Gb), with plans for a couple more.

Good man.

I have 3 Crucial M4s (256GB), a two samsung 840 pros (256GB) and a few OWC drives to my name. The samsungs definitely send the other drives packing.

 

[datsafail]

With prices coming down a bit, I'm still on the fence. Is it worth it to get a hybrid-ssd? I mainly do video editing and 3d rendering with Final Cut Pro and DAZ 3D. It seems in most of my research SSD only really improves application opening and booting up. Rendering seems to be more on the processor, gpu and memory. Thoughts?

I would get a few SSDs - a 64GB or 128GB for caches, a 128GB or 256GB for your boot volume, and perhaps a 512GB for your main storage. HDDs are just too vulnerable and slow.

 

[esben72]

I have one 128GB OCZ Octane for boot drive, from there I have symlinked all my User Directory folders like Music and Documents and so on to a 1TB internal drive.

That works great. I do want an additional SSD to store my DNG Raw files as the SSD speed up in Lightroom is a must for good workflow, the diff in just getting a preview loaded is greatly superior with SSD speed.

As for the hassle when cloning and formatting with the SSD utility (can't remember what it is called when you restore to factory new state) to regain the performance or upgrading a destructible FW update.... Well for the fast app opening and general responsiveness it is worth the trouble once a year for me.

I think about all the power in the current CPU, RAM, GPU, FSB all the way down to the hard drive and it just seems obvious to avoid the tight bottleneck of a spinning HDD...

SymLinker

https://github.com/jossgray/SymLinker

Symbolic links are a god sent if you don't have a ton of money for SSD's, and in a contextual menu it is so dead easy and just works...