Been considering an upgrade to SSD for a while now. I am computer savvy but not to sure about SSD at the moment.

I currently have:

Apple MacBook Pro 15" Unibody (June 09 version)

2.8Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo

4Gb DDR3 1066mhz Ram

500Gb 7200 Rpm HDD (i upgraded this from the 5400 rpm one it came with)

Now i prefer not to carry loads of stuff around with me. I have my iPad for that.

However for UK based work i carry in addition to the MBP & Power Cables:

500Gb Portable HDD which is used purely for Time Machine

500Gb Portable HDD which has all my Films on (of all varieties )

500Gb Portable HDD which has all my Data/Work stuff on.

Now if i decide to go for a 240Gb SSD Drive (like this ONE ) will i still get the same speed as the Data being accessed is on a 7200rpm drive therefore will only go so fast. Or will i get a big increase.

I know that the start up both for the OS & Apps will be quicker but will it all just slow down due to using the External drive.

Also can you run VMWare on an SSD Drive.

Would it be possible to retain the current HDD in the machine and Also install an SSD or would it just be a case of one or the other?

It will be much faster than any hard drive... so it will replace your current internal drive..

Also you should do *alot* of research as theres several different flavours of SSDs around, all with different performance characteristics.. the most important one being TRIM support which in a nutshell will stop the SSD slowing down over time.

Bit-tech, anandtech and tomshardware are good sites to get group-reviews of SSD drives. although allegedly its projected that the price of SSDs will drop to around the $1 per GB by the end of this year, so it might be worth holding out if you can

Trim is only supported by windows 7 though.

Thats why I linked that drive as it has a sandforce cotroller which apparently does the same thing.

Has anyone had experience of the hybrid drives?

I was reading about drives the other day with normal HDDs, but with a smallish SSD included. Seemed like genius to me, HDD for write speed, and cheap volume, yet SSD for speeding up regular activites.

It sounded like the HDD Controller, worked out what to put on the SSD part, so the HDD should optimise itself for speed over time.

Not sure SSD is right for my laptop yet, but a hybrid sounded like a perfect upgrade to me.

Linky

Edited 29 August, 201015 yr by SnailUK

Hybrid drives were hyped for a while then when they came out didn't actually seem to be able to offer much of a performance boost so I've not looked into them since then. However the figures for that Momentus XT don't look bad at all so may give it a shot, I've currently got a mix of SSD and HDD machines but I'm not happy with the SSD only laptops as it's a pain having to keep the bulk of the data on a separate drive. On my desktop I've the SSD paired with a large hard drive which works speed wise but clumsy to manage, I have a 13in machine with a 320GB 5400rpm drive that would go well with one of these drives as I can up the capacity and speed hopefully.

John

Unlike hard drives, if a drive corrupts presently any data on it is gone. It's also very expensive way to store data at this time.

SSD is still too infantile if serious about data storage IMO. It's fine if you want to show off you have one though.

It will be much faster than any hard drive... so it will replace your current internal drive..

No it won't, it will be faster than a hard drive in certain circumstances.

Writing data will not be one of them, especially random writes.

Also if you do replace your hard disk, turn off indexing and file access time updates or you will trash the SSD in no time.

Also look out for MLC flash as opposed to SLC flash, it is cheaper, but IMHO less reliable and a bit slower.

Also you should do *alot* of research as theres several different flavours of SSDs around, all with different performance characteristics.. the most important one being TRIM support which in a nutshell will stop the SSD slowing down over time.

Bit-tech, anandtech and tomshardware are good sites to get group-reviews of SSD drives. although allegedly its projected that the price of SSDs will drop to around the $1 per GB by the end of this year, so it might be worth holding out if you can

Even with trim, things will still slow down over the initial performance as the drive fills up. Sure trim certainly helps, but it's not all things to all people.

As for $1/GB on SSD, I wouldn't put my money on that, but even if they did that's still a lot more than $100 for a 2TB drive (5 cents per GB and a 2TB drive is a premium product right now).

Another thing to consider is that in certain modes of operation an SSD can use more power than a laptop hard disk.

As for hybrid drives, you could do, but you have to think what you want to store and if the money wouldn't just be better spent on more RAM instead.

Edited 31 August, 201015 yr by cheezemonkhai

As for hybrid drives, you could do, but you have to think what you want to store and if the money wouldn't just be better spent on more RAM instead.

No, the Momentus XT does that part - you use it as a normal hard drive and the drive itself manages the flash memory by putting the most regularly used data into the flash memory. More ram isn't going to be of benefit as it doesn't permanently store anything.

John

No, the Momentus XT does that part - you use it as a normal hard drive and the drive itself manages the flash memory by putting the most regularly used data into the flash memory. More ram isn't going to be of benefit as it doesn't permanently store anything.

John

I'm very familiar with the drives, but the point I was making is that depending on the firmware loaded depends on what the drive considers as the criteria to use to store things.

If you need a new drive or want more capacity then go for it, but if everything is fine right now, then I'd be considering my options.

More ram isn't going to be of benefit as it doesn't permanently store anything.

John

Indeed it does not, but when the 'puter is running most filesystems will use it as a cache for read data, so if you are read intensive and run memory hungry applications it will help speed things up and drive down power consumption.

Thanks for all the input folks

I am going to hang fire for now anyway as i want at least 480gb of storage to replace the 500gb HDD in there now. However as 480gb SSD is currently just over £1k i shall wait

RAM is not really an option (i already have 4GB DDR3 1066Mhz) as apart from making the odd movie etc i don't have anything that requires more than that. It would cost me about £300 aswell to up to 8GB as i would have to remove both 2GB sticks currently in the drive.

My Solution at the moment will be to leave the current HDD in and add a 480GB SSD (By sacrificing the Optical drive however this will go into a USB Enclosure in case its ever needed) That way then i can keep all the data on the HDD and just use the SSD for the OS & Apps. That way it should minimise the amount of writing done to the SSD and the Sandforce Controller should take care of the rest.

Can anyone (Mark/Cheezemonkhai as you seem to know your stuff) see any potential problems with a setup that way?

I agree 4GB is probably more than fine for most home users, especially with that sort of price for an upgrade.

I guess the first question I have is, is there a facia and adapter that allows you to mount a HDD where the optical drive was?

Also is the DVD drive SATA or perhaps it could be a PATA interface as there are a lot of those still around.

Depending if you have SATA I or SATA II on the interface, you will be limited to 1.5Gbits/second or 3 Gbits/second, but that's hardly a limit you're going to notice, especially in the latter case.

Another question worth asking is why do you feel the need to "upgrade"?

I ask this as the main hard drive should be ok, especially if it's a 7k2rpm drive with a reasonable buffer.

If you want to put certain files on there such as the OS, then hold the data elsewhere that's a perfectly sensible thing to do, but bear in mind some writes etc can be slower.

Also you have to be careful to turn certain things off, such as the indexing function on the SSD and move any index files and swap files onto the HDD and off the SSD.

I'm sure there must be pages out there detailing this and how to set the options on a mac.

If you do want to do that, then you have a few options, either a larger MLC drive or a smaller SLC drive.

If it was my money, I'd probably save it, but if I had to take an SSD option I think I'd plump for an 80-120GB SLC SSD device, assuming your OS and apps you want will fit on there.

Hope that helps.

Edited 1 September, 201015 yr by cheezemonkhai

On another forum I'm on, someone mentioned "short stroking" - basically you have an ordinary drive but only use the fastest bit (at the cost of reduced capacity).

Linky

On another forum I'm on, someone mentioned "short stroking" - basically you have an ordinary drive but only use the fastest bit (at the cost of reduced capacity).

Linky

Retro

Only recently seen it done on 15k class drives as otherwise you might as well buy a higher RPM drive as it will be cheaper.

Not seen them used on new systems for a while though.

Edited 1 September, 201015 yr by cheezemonkhai

I'm very familiar with the drives, but the point I was making is that depending on the firmware loaded depends on what the drive considers as the criteria to use to store things.

If you need a new drive or want more capacity then go for it, but if everything is fine right now, then I'd be considering my options.

If you're familiar with the drives then your comment makes no sense as you don't have to think about what you're storing and drive doesn't really either, all it's doing is keeping an eye on the most frequently used data and moving that to the flash memory. From a user point of view it's identical to conventional drive.

If the machine is running out of physical memory then adding RAM should definitely be the first choice for improving performance as a machine relying on the hard drive instead will be chronically slow. However it shouldn't be considered as an alternative to an SSD in a machine with suitable memory as it's just going to sit idle most of the time despite Windows Vista/7 trying to make better use of it. Between my machines with 2GB ram and 8GB ram, both offer similar performance in general usage as the bulk of the ram is just sitting idle and only kicks in when the machine is running more intensive apps. Changing it to an SSD based setup has substantially improved performance as expected, for a while my fastest machine for general use was running just 1GB of memory but had an early SSD which could boot the OS and ready to the desktop in under five seconds.

John

I agree 4GB is probably more than fine for most home users, especially with that sort of price for an upgrade.

I guess the first question I have is, is there a facia and adapter that allows you to mount a HDD where the optical drive was?

Also is the DVD drive SATA or perhaps it could be a PATA interface as there are a lot of those still around.

Depending if you have SATA I or SATA II on the interface, you will be limited to 1.5Gbits/second or 3 Gbits/second, but that's hardly a limit you're going to notice, especially in the latter case.

Another question worth asking is why do you feel the need to "upgrade"?

I ask this as the main hard drive should be ok, especially if it's a 7k2rpm drive with a reasonable buffer.

If you want to put certain files on there such as the OS, then hold the data elsewhere that's a perfectly sensible thing to do, but bear in mind some writes etc can be slower.

Also you have to be careful to turn certain things off, such as the indexing function on the SSD and move any index files and swap files onto the HDD and off the SSD.

I'm sure there must be pages out there detailing this and how to set the options on a mac.

If you do want to do that, then you have a few options, either a larger MLC drive or a smaller SLC drive.

If it was my money, I'd probably save it, but if I had to take an SSD option I think I'd plump for an 80-120GB SLC SSD device, assuming your OS and apps you want will fit on there.

Hope that helps.

Mark,

Yes there is an enclosure/adaptor that you can get which will allow removal of the Optical drive for replacement with HDD/SSD

I have SATA II - This is the HDD i replaced it with Seagate HDD

The reason i was looking at it is i am thinking of keeping the Machine for longer than i normally would.

It has a 2.8Ghz Dual Core Processor and 4GB of DDR3 Ram so no problems there ( i can always upgrade to 8Gb once RAM drops in price), Having already upgraded the HDD i was thinking about making the MacBook quicker and more responsive. Not that it isn't already but having seen someone elses MBP who replaced his HDD for the SSD i linked fast isn't the word. His computer boots up from cold to fully running in about 15 secs, Apps all start within 2 secs etc etc.

So Rather than pay say £1800 for a new MBP (Which is what it would be to replace this one to the same spec machine) pay £500 now and get maybe another 12-18 months out of the machine.

it's not a necessity was just an idea i was tinkering with.

What's the difference with MLC & SLC?

If you're familiar with the drives then your comment makes no sense as you don't have to think about what you're storing and drive doesn't really either, all it's doing is keeping an eye on the most frequently used data and moving that to the flash memory. From a user point of view it's identical to conventional drive.

If the machine is running out of physical memory then adding RAM should definitely be the first choice for improving performance as a machine relying on the hard drive instead will be chronically slow. However it shouldn't be considered as an alternative to an SSD in a machine with suitable memory as it's just going to sit idle most of the time despite Windows Vista/7 trying to make better use of it. Between my machines with 2GB ram and 8GB ram, both offer similar performance in general usage as the bulk of the ram is just sitting idle and only kicks in when the machine is running more intensive apps. Changing it to an SSD based setup has substantially improved performance as expected, for a while my fastest machine for general use was running just 1GB of memory but had an early SSD which could boot the OS and ready to the desktop in under five seconds.

John

I am indeed very familiar with many types of storage and hard disk drive.

I'm sorry to say that your above comment seems to suggest that you believe a lot of the SSD hype.

While there are advantages there are also disadvantages including cases where SSD's are substantially less fast than a hard disk, not to mention the obvious ones.

The comment on the SSD/Hybrid drive not needing to know, obviously the drive does because it has to make the decision as to what stays in Flash and what goes to disk. Perhaps the drive might just use the SSD as a write cache instead. Plenty of options.

The drive could potentially have different firmware depending on the workload/environment it will be used in.

This is the common on many hard drives and you can change a drives characteristics greatly just by changing the firmware.

Also no RAM isn't a direct SSD replacement (unless it's got a BBU or a supercap). However if things are slow running and the drive is fast and healthy, then a RAM upgrade will often provide a lot more bang per buck as it prevents the need to go to disk (swap) as often.

Back to the OP's comments:

....

I have SATA II - This is the HDD i replaced it with Seagate HDD

That's the drive mate, I was talking about the controller on the mainboard for the optical drive you've be replacing. I'd think it will be SATA II or PATA, hopefully the first.

The reason i was looking at it is i am thinking of keeping the Machine for longer than i normally would.

It has a 2.8Ghz Dual Core Processor and 4GB of DDR3 Ram so no problems there ( i can always upgrade to 8Gb once RAM drops in price), Having already upgraded the HDD i was thinking about making the MacBook quicker and more responsive. Not that it isn't already but having seen someone elses MBP who replaced his HDD for the SSD i linked fast isn't the word. His computer boots up from cold to fully running in about 15 secs, Apps all start within 2 secs etc etc.

So Rather than pay say £1800 for a new MBP (Which is what it would be to replace this one to the same spec machine) pay £500 now and get maybe another 12-18 months out of the machine.

it's not a necessity was just an idea i was tinkering with.

Sounds like a sensible and considered move as long as your aware of the down sides of flash as well as the up sides.

What's the difference with MLC & SLC?

MLC is Multi Level Cell (many bits stored per flash cell) and SLC is Single Level Cell (On bit stored per flash cell)

MLC is generally cheaper to make than SLC so you can have a bigger MLC drive for the same money.

SLC is generally more reliable than MLC, particularly in the region of write

SLC is generally a little bit faster.

This link has more info - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_cell

HTH

Edited 2 September, 201015 yr by cheezemonkhai

Mark,

What do you think to this drive? Especially the claim about performance degradation?

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce/Solid_State_Pro

After a bit of research i found this in an article

Independent simulation tests by leading drive performance experts confirm the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD’s ultra-efficient Block Management & Wear Leveling technologies are able to eliminate virtually any reduction in data transfer speeds over heavy long term usage of the drive and without dependency on less than effective OS TRIM management.

Full Article here:

OWC SSD

I can't really comment on the drive as the advert is obviously that and the later seems like a bit of an interesting one especially as that claim isn't given a source.

It's also very easy to tune the tests and hardware to do well in the tests.

What I would say is that the drives will always slow down after a bit, but if this drive reduces the rate of decline past this initial point then that's a good thing.

Obviously I'd need to know how it actually worked to say if there were down sides too, but I somehow doubt that information will be public any time soon.

This claim is interesting:

2,000,000 Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) (based on Sandforce processor operation)

purely because that sounds like they are talking about the processor alone.

Combined with these

Protection:

* ECC Recovery: Up to 24 bytes correctable per 512-byte sector

* Unrecoverable Read Errors: Less than 1 sector per 1016 bits read

which mention nothing of write life.

I can't find out if it's SLC or MLC chips either, but that's a relatively low price so if I had to guess I'd say the latter.

It's your money, so at the end of the day only you can make the call if you want to spend £100 on giving it a punt and see what you think.

I'd have a dig and see what other reviews/comments you get on that company and their products and then look at it with that information.

HTH

The drives are all MLC

I was talking more about the Technology and the drive i linked in my second to last post goes to 480GB.

EDIT: - This One

Edited 2 September, 201015 yr by vRSCarl

The drives are all MLC

I was talking more about the Technology and the drive i linked in my second to last post goes to 480GB.

EDIT: - This One

Sorry mate, what I was trying to say was that in principle it sounds good, but then many things can sound (and turn out to be) too good to be true.

I'm sure it will help matters in that respect, but whether it's as good as they claim or if it has other side effects is unknown to me, purely because I've not tested one myself.

If you go for one of the smaller drives then it's worth a punt, it just depends how much you want to store

HTH

Cheers

Well I caved in and bought a 64GB SSD for my main PC. Have reinstalled W7 and now finishing moving stuff around on my old spinning HDD.

So far, very happy