Solid State Drives - worth the money yet ?

[jarski]

hi! am considering of buying SSD for my aging MacBook4,1. there is still space left in old disk, but its more of buying my mind rest, hard drive failures are annoying incidents (I do take backups once in 1-2 months to external USB-drive, which is enough for my use).

but question about SSD's, that are pretty new toys. any comments about using them (speed increase?), or brands to recommend ? opinions has technology matured enough or better choose good old hard disk still ? no compatibility issues with Macs or OS X ? thanks.

 

[fbf]

$100 for 80gb (intel) maybe. I won't pay $300 for a 80GB drive.

 

[dof]

Speed benefit depends on your usage. Certainly start-up and shutdown of the machine will be significantly faster. Beyond that, the increases will be more a matter of how your apps use memory vs. swapping out data to and from the hard drive. Working on >1Gb Photoshop documents or compiling assets for a computer game project will see great increases in performance, whereas your email client and word processor won't.

I can't comment on reliability personally, but a device with no moving parts is in theory a great improvement over a complex mechanism such as a hard disk.

As for the cost, that's up to each user to decide.

 

[imokruok]

No moving parts is indeed a benefit if you expect that your computer will be subjected to shocks, but I think for desktop use, it's actually kind of a wash. Sure, regular hard drive motors and electronics can fail, but SSDs fail in other ways too, and any catastrophic data recovery is even more tenuous.

Unfortunately, there have been a few studies that show data retention on SSDs isn't nearly as good as on regular hard drives...yet. (e.g. SSDs that had data on them and were stored for just a few years were already exhibiting errors.) In my experience, that has never been much of a problem with regular disks - I recently pulled a bunch of text documents off of my Mac IIcx SCSI hard drive that was 20 years old. But if you don't care about that kind of retention, it's not an issue.

(As a sidenote, let me suggest that you use complete image backups for backing up files regardless of what kind of drive you have. I haven't tried the Windows 7 native one yet, but the one I use from Acronis is fantastic. If my hard drive fails today, I can swap it out, run the bootable rescue media, and get a perfect image restore from my external disk to the new disk. You can also use it as an easy way to upgrade disk size without a cumbersome copy and reinstall procedure.)

 

[pevelg]

I use a 30gb SSD in my Mac Mini and it runs really fast. The problem lies in the OSX ability to regenerate the SSD drive. As the drive gets filled up and overwritten, speed decreases. I keep about 20gb free on my SSD drive to maintain fast speed. This creates a problem when working with large size photos (my scans from Silverfast are around 700mb). I am most likely going to be buying a MacPro so I can use the standard HD as my burn/write harddrive and the SSD as my operating system drive. For me, the drastic increase in speed is worth it, but it does have its caveats, especially the price. I got my 30gb for $99.

 

[jarski]

thanks for comments and experiences so far. sounds like SSD's are not that mature yet, to replace traditional hard drives completely. pavelg's idea of launching OS from SSD while keeping important files on hard drive is also interesting, but not an option for us laptop users.

 

[binky]

No moving parts is indeed a benefit if you expect that your computer will be subjected to shocks, but I think for desktop use, it's actually kind of a wash. Sure, regular hard drive motors and electronics can fail, but SSDs fail in other ways too, and any catastrophic data recovery is even more tenuous.

Unfortunately, there have been a few studies that show data retention on SSDs isn't nearly as good as on regular hard drives...yet. (e.g. SSDs that had data on them and were stored for just a few years were already exhibiting errors.) In my experience, that has never been much of a problem with regular disks - I recently pulled a bunch of text documents off of my Mac IIcx SCSI hard drive that was 20 years old. But if you don't care about that kind of retention, it's not an issue.

I've heard the same thing, something along the line that because flash memory is so thin you're talking about atomic level deterioration (half-life?).

For now, they are still very expensive technology, and I'm not sure how much more you gain in faster access speed to stored information. And most likely in a couple of years you will be eyeing a new laptop with a lot of updated features with better prices.

Anyway, although not ideal you can always put your laptop in suspend or sleep mode for faster start up. And maxing out your RAM helps. An old prof of mine once said, to get more out of your computer, get more memory. This has to do with less "paging" (swapping information by the CPU) and bottlenecks at the motherboard level. This was generally true for decades, and I don't believe the thinking has changed.

 

[jarski]

An old prof of mine once said, to get more out of your computer, get more memory. This has to do with less "paging" (swapping information by the CPU) and bottlenecks at the motherboard level. This was generally true for decades, and I don't believe the thinking has changed.

topping the RAM definitely helps with OS X on Macs (probably with latest Windows too), and its easy to add. been running 4GB on this Macbook, without running out the memory. better graphics card would be nice to have though.

 

[pevelg]

I'm talking about 12 second boot times. Yep. I start timing at time I press the power button and I am on desktop between 10 and 15 seconds. I consider being on desktop as the time you can move mouse to launch applications.

 

[splitimageview]

I've used a Crucial 128GB SSD since last July. I can't imagine going back to a standard HD as the boot drive. When I do boot from a regular HD, it's very difficult to wait...wait...wait...and wait some more, while the icons start appearing on the desktop...before the system will allow keyboard input...while the application icons bounce in the dock...

When I used a standard HD I would rarely shut down the computer, because it would take so long to reboot. I would just make it sleep. Now, shutting down and restarting is so fast it's like waking from sleep.

Everything is faster. I can open every app in my dock in about 20 seconds.

Macbook Pro 15" unibody, 4GB RAM

 

[splitimageview]

To show that I'm not exaggerating 🙂 I put together this video.

Here are 31 apps all opened at the same time, and then closed one by one by clicking on the icons in the dock.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NpdHqH3zYg

 

[pixelatedscraps]

I looked into getting an SSD for my new Macbook Pro last week but the as others have said, the price vs capacity doesn't really add up for most day-to-day activities.

Right now, I have my eye on the new Seagate Momentus XT - it is a hybrid SSD/HDD using a small amount of NAND-based flash to read/write the most used programs on a system. The amount is small, 4Mb - and it comes in 320Gb / 500Gb flavors, but it does offer a substantial speed boost it seems.

There is a fairly good review on the Anandtech website. Am I getting one just yet? No, I'm holding out for a 16 or 32Mb version which I'm sure will be appearing over the next 12 months.

Hope it helps!