“Adding iOS UI elements of OS X means lots more small I/Os, the kind that disks do poorly and SSDs do well,” Robin Harris writes for ZDNet. “Don’t buy a new Mac without an SSD or you’ll regret it!”
“All iOS devices run on solid state storage. Mac OS is including many iOS features – such as remembering all open windows and documents – that require many small I/Os for both data and metadata,” Harris writes. “Finally, Lion performance – boot up, file access times, page swapping, context switching – all suck using a 7200 RPM drive. And if you’re running FCP X, forget it: booting up on a disk takes minutes from what I’ve seen on an 8-core Mac Pro.”
Harris writes, “How much suckage? Let’s just say that my 1.86GHz Core Duo 2, 4GB MacBook Air with a 128GB SSD outperforms my 3.4GHz quad-core i7, 16GB iMac on ≈90% of the work I do. And it is more stable… Once MacBooks go all SSD, the performance difference between them and most Wintel ‘books will be obvious. Expect more envy from cheap Wintel notebook users.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: On the rare occasion that we use a non-SSD Mac, the experience is jarring, as we’ve become used to the speed of the SSDs in our MacBook Airs and iMacs. It’s a huge difference. Once you go SSD, you won’t go back.
Excuse my ignorance but do you just keep an external hard device plugged in all the time?
Good question. I use my main MBP for DJing weddings with Traktor and I’ve loaded it with a 1TB HDD loaded with AIFF files. If I swapped in a SSD drive I’d have to lug an external with me storing all my media files. Sure, I could get by with smaller files but it’s 2012 and MP3s suck. As does not having the one song someone requested. And no, storing in iCloud doesn’t work because not all venues have coverage.
LOL, what? If you think MP3s suck that badly, I would suggest you’re not encoding them properly.
Regardless, I would bet that 99% of the population wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between an AIFF file and a well-encoded MP4 audio file, especially with the acoustics of the kind of room that most wedding parties take place in.
Sorry, that sounds more like superstition to me.
Aiff files are a waste of space, re-encode them to apple lossless or flac, both are also lossless and take up less space
What?
For one, an external hard drive is ideal for a Time Machine backup. An SSD would be totally wasted as a backup device.
I just scored a Seagate GoFlex Desk Thunderbolt Adapter at my local Apple Store. Just hooked it up – AMAZINGLY fast! I just moved my entire iTunes library over to it in a matter of minutes – not hours! Thunderbolt X-HDs are the way to go!
Count me as someone who went back.
Ya, SSDs are faster, quieter, more power efficient, cooler, and perhaps more reliable, but…
They are significantly more expensive per GB, and don’t yet come in capacities available for conventional hard drives.
I have 2TBs in my MacBook Pro 13″ and 1.75TBs in my MacBook Pro 15″. The 15″ MBP has one drive that’s a 750GB hybrid and while not as fast as a SSD, it’s significantly faster than 5400 drives, or even other conventional 7200 rpm drives.
The bottom line here is that there are options. Choose the option that’s right for you based on all the variables of consideration. A SSD isn’t any good if you either can’t afford it, or if it won’t hold all the data you need.
Oh, and I should add, on my MBP 15″, Final Cut Pro X launches in under 5 seconds (not “minutes” as the author suggests).
I haven’t checked in about 6 months but I couldn’t find a 2TB laptop drive for my 15″MBP. What do you have? I’ll go take a new look. Also, is your hybrid made by Seagate?
I got that by pulling the optical drive and putting 2 x 1TB drives in the MBP 13″. In the MBP 15″ I also pulled the optical drive and put in 1TB and a 750GB Seagate Momentus Hybride Drive.
I will buy a MacBook with an SSD when they come in sizes at least as large or larger than my current 750GB hard drive. Until then, no dice.
I was with you until I got to the “Add $1200.00” on the build-to-order form.
Don’t ever use the BTO options for an SSD… 😛
Go get a 300GB Intel 320 SSD which will work nicely on your mac. It’s also a good deal at $500. Install it, use Internet Recovery to reinstall Lion, and then you’re good to go 🙂
unless if you have a 2011 or newer Mac.
Then you get the extra connection that makes upgrades not from apple throw errors and run your fan at full speed 24/7.
I haven’t checked in a while, but my 2011 iMac requires apple branded hd’s still. Macsales/owc was working on their own upgrade to bypass that extra connection but nothing yet.
Until the price comes down, I won’t be buying an ssd. I like the speed… Just not the extortion prices.
Is this an issue for the macbook pros, too? 🙁
I really hope not. As I’m currently saving up some money to buy an SSD for my Pro….
I just put an SSD into my ORIGINAL macbook air, which was really on its last legs.
Now it’s not perfect, but MAN is it better. A whole new computer.
For the $140 for a 60gig ssd.
I suggest that, before getting a new computer, consider (if you don’t need a ton of storage) replacing the drive with an SSD.
All of my laptops now use SSDs, including my old G4 PowerBook. The difference is amazing. I only wish Apple supported TRIM on non-Apple SSDs.
Im with the others here who say until SSD comes in sizes that are big enough AND affordable, I’ll be sticking with my 750GB spinning platters.
Agreed. What a lot of the SSD zealots forget is that as software developers improve upon and add new features to their programs, storage requirements are only going to go up, not down. So it’s just not practical to go from a 750GB hard drive to a 512GB SSD.
check out the Momentus XT hybrid drives. They’re a HDD with small SSD. It transparently puts your most frequently accessed info onto the SSD, resulting in faster boot times and program launches. It’s not as fast as a pure SSD, but it’s noticeably faster than a HDD.
I have the 500 GB HDD/4 GB SSD one in my MBP and really like it. Boot times are faster, as is launching programs I use every day. If I launch something I’ve not run in a while it won’t be in the SSD anymore, so it’ll load up with normal HDD speeds. I’m about out of room and will be replacing it with the new 750 GB HDD/8 GB SDD model in the next month or two.
I bought and installed a Momentus XT (750 gig) drive in my Mid 2009 MacBook Pro. And absolute and complete CLUSTERFSCK! My god, my previously rock solid Mac was turned into a useless pile of crap with that drive in. Could not stay up more than 10 minutes without crashing; even just standing there unused it would crash hard. I tried everything to get that drive to work. Hours on the phone with Seagate, hours over at Apple Discussions. No suggestion would help me. If I boot off the Momentus XT externally, absolutely NO PROBLEMS. Install it in my MacBook, a train wreck.
What a nightmare.
My dad ran into the same problem with his MBP. My researched turned up that it’s a problem with the rev A motherboard that was triggered by the EFI 1.7 firmware update. The update enables SATA 2.0 support(3 Gbit/s), but the rev A motherboard can’t handle the sustained speeds of the SSD. Apple wouldn’t fix it because the MBP “worked as designed with a HDD”.
The rev A 2009 MBP can work with SSD drives if you revert to EFI 1.6 or force the SSD to use SATA 1.0 speeds (1.5 Gbit/s).
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?68873-Finally-the-truth-about-the-mid-2009-Macbook-Pro-and-Vertex-drives
I have considered the hybrid drives, but the feedback I see does not look good. Check the user reviews on Amazon- lots of 1 star ratings from Mac users.
I have 12GB of RAM, that helps.
I do need to look up about making a temp ram drive on a Mac.
Even faster than an SSD. 🙂
Any Chance that would work with 64 GB of RAM on a mac pro?
Sweet Jesus that would be awesome 😀
That would work too. In any case, it seems like, for the MBP target market, it would seem a better move to make different use of that real estate in the computer than to just decrease the real estate for the sake of making a smaller computer. You want a thin computer? Get a MacBook Air. MBP users want something else.
If you are on the fence about SSDs, DO NOT try one out! The improvement in system responsiveness is so remarkable that you are liable to forget all about the downside (lack of space, price of Apple-supplied drives, potential for failure without warning).
I am running an early-2008 MacBook Pro (last non-unibody model) from a SSD in its PCI-card slot. Requires putting most 3rd-party apps and personal documents/data on the HDD for space reasons, but MAN does this baby fly!
I installed four SDDs into my 2008 Mac Pro. Then set them up using Disk Utility as a RAID array. I’ve been running it this way for almost two years. It’s fast, faster than fast. Lion only made it better. I’d recommend getting at least two and setting them up as RAID, if you can.
I have other drives connected, and eSATA for backups, video and photos. But for all the applications and files I use everyday, they are all on the SDD RAID.
SSD’s: too small, too expensive.
On current iMacs, you can have both. I’m planning to get an iMac and (eventually) have it boot and run apps off an SSD, and store most of my user data on the hard drive.
However, my current iMac is a “Late 2006” model running Lion, and it still seems pretty quick to me. I guess I haven’t been “spoiled.” The stock hard drive started to become unreliable last year, so I replaced it with a WD Velociraptor. I keep mostly the OS and apps on that internal drive (with plenty of free space), and most of my user data files/folders are stored on two FireWIre external drives, with a very large USB 2.0 external drive for Time Machine backing up everything.
I agree with just about everyone above in terms of an SSD being costly, small capacity, and if you lose data, the data recovery apps will probably be useless. (SSDs shuffle their data around using their own internal processors to maintain a type of wear equalizing – read/writes are finite in SSDs)
For those people still living in caves and think they need TRIM, just about every SSD currently produced has its own customized version of TRIM to maintain the SSDs longest life and best speed. If you use an external TRIM controlled by your Mac, it could interfere with the SSDs internal TRIM/maintenance routines. DONT USE TRIM unless you have one of the very first SSDs (rare).
I’d put the OS, user preference files, and apps on the internal SSD. All other data and files on an external Thunderbolt hard drive that has a separate partition for Time Machine.
It sounds like you have to have Time Capsule if you have a SSD. I back up my home MBP monthly and that’s enough for me.
This is the first I’ve heard that SSDs use their own firmware version of TRIM. Can you provide anything more information wise other than calling people cavemen?
I use Seagate’s 750GB hybrid drive in my MBP, which is now noticeably faster and better performing than it was with the stock 5400rpm drive. For less than $200 it’s hard to beat.
Please excuse my ignorance, but how reliable are current SSDs? Also, which brands should I be looking for to install in my ’08 Mac Pro? I’m interested in 250GB or 500GB. Thanks in advance.
I’ve had SSDs as the main drive in my 2008 Mac Pro for two years this coming August. I haven’t had a problem with them at all. I guess I really can’t comment on reliability until they’ve been running for a few years more. 🙂
OWC made the best ones when I purchased mine. I would look at theirs first.
I work in the data recovery industry. From what I have seen, reliability of static drives is currently just a little bit worse than traditional spinning hard drives. Getting closer, though.
Really, reliability should not be a factor, as you should have a backup for everything, be it an HDD or SSD.
While they are close on reliability I can tell you that SSDs are much, much more expensive to do data recovery on and much more likely to be unrecoverable than HDDs. Whatever you use, keep it backed up.
Amen, brother!
Another point to keep in mind is that a failing HDD will usually give you some advance warning that it is dying, often allowing you to make one last backup. But a SSD will seem perfectly fine one moment, then BOOM it is stone cold dead.
Happened to me. Drive was fine at bedtime, completely unresponsive and and not even capable of being erased the next morning. But thanks to my backup habits, all I lost was a few email messages.
While SSD certainly has the aforementioned advantages, I don’t find it jarring to use a Mac w/o an SSD as SSDs remain a bit pricey for the storage capacity. Besides, who shuts down a Mac anyway?
Former PC owners often shut down their Macs out of habit, despite being told not to. 😉
Forgive my ignorance, but are you really not supposed to shut down a Mac? I know that when Steve Jobs introduced the MBA, he talked about how you could just put it to sleep by closing it, and it would stay good for 30 days, but I had no idea that shutting down your Mac would actually make it _worse._ My wife always freaks out if I just close my MBP and put it to sleep, but if someone can show me where I’d be better off putting it to sleep than shutting it down, please educate me!
I turn off my wifi and close the lid. My MBP is from late 2006. It only gets shut off if I’m taking it on a trip.
There is no harm done to your Mac if you shut it down, but there is definitely no discernible benefit either.
However, there is a major benefit in NOT shutting a Mac down (unless some major system update requires it). There are nightly jobs that every Mac does (the UNIX OS that it is), which do some clean-up duties, purging unnecessary files and logs. When a Mac is shut down, these aren’t done and the unnecessary junk piles up.
Besides, a Mac that is shut down takes over 15 seconds to get ready for use, once powered up. A Mac that is put to sleep (by closing the lid) wakes up in about 500 milliseconds. In addition, all the windows from the previous session are still open, all the widgets are already loaded and ready to open and there is no wait for anything.
Unlike Windows, where a PC still takes about 10 seconds to wake up properly, and there is a 50-50 chance that something would go wrong and some application or service would freeze, Mac consistently wakes up like it never went to sleep.
When SSDs get to the point wherethey can store a sensible amount of information, Ill think about it. Right now, Iwould need 100 of them to store my files. And what’s the big deal about speed? How can you get faster than instant?
Actually there’s really no reason at all for using an SSD to store files (songs, images, movies, what have you) because once you’ve read them into RAM, they aren’t access all that much. It’s having System and Library, plus some huge apps on it that make an SSD really a time-saver.
But the big deal about speed is really noticed when you are on a different Mac that doesn’t have an SSD. There truly is a speed difference. Oh, I know all about our perceived “need for speed” when the difference between an HDD and an SSD is only a matter of seconds, but once you get used to it, it’s like being behind a Sunday driver out on a winding country road.
After spending years developing OSX for Mac into a reasonable OS, Apple loads it down with iOS interface elements that can’t really be justified for Macs because of some crazy idea Apple has, independent of what customers want, hmmm everyday now Apple sounds more and more like another company I have learned to dislike. Some have suggested that Apple should rid itself of Mac, maybe that’s exactly what Apple is trying to achieve.
Buy macbook with stock HDD, go buy an Intel SSD.
Problem solved. You save a good bit, and you get a reliable SSD 🙂
Ive been using a 120GB SSD from OWC. Its my scratch disk for Lightroom, PS and a cache for other programs. I still need a platter for internal storage.
Just pull your SuperDrive from your MBP and move your platter in that space then drop in a 6G SSD and you are off to the races.
OWC: http://eshop.macsales.com/search/ssd
It is important to match your SSD speed to the rated capacity of your Mac. In other words, if you put a 6Gigabit SSD into a 3Gigabit Mac, like a 2008 iMac, you could have your speed downgraded to 1.5Gigabits as happened to me recently when I tried the upgrade described above. When I changed to a slower 3Gigabit SSD the speed rating became equal to the iMacs.
I use 240GB SSD OCZ Vertex 3 on my Late 2011 MBP for system and applications and Promise Pegasus R6 12TB (Thunderbolt) for storage. They are just awesome.
Working on big projects, using virtual machines and a lot of other things is just lightning fast!
Of course also the speed of your money going away from your wallet, is noticeable (-: …
There’s also a noticeable difference in sheer loss of GBs. I actually posted on a previous thread (one where it suggested that MBPs were going to abandon HDD altogether), and in response to people who suggested I should focus on the positives of SSDs over HDDs instead of worrying about the loss of a third of internal storage drive space (750GB down to 512GB), and I posted actual numbers of what I used those 750GB for. Now it sounds like the speed boost is only incremental, and the tradeoff really isn’t even worth it. More justification to keep those spinning platters just a little longer.
I did the OWC optical swap with an SSD for my MacBook Pro 15″ i7. System and apps are on the 240 gig SSD and my user is on my 750 gig internal HD. I just had to do it to deal with my Final Cut Pro X projects.
Love it!!! No going back.
I just did this same upgrade for my 2009.5 15″ MBP in mid March. I use a 240 GB OWC Mercury Electra w/ 3Gb SATA bus speed to match my motherboard, and my factory 320GB 7200rpm Seagate HDD is now the secondary disk mounted in the location of the DVD Super Drive. I’d read the reviews, and resisted this upgrade for over a year, but it has made the nearly 3 year old MBP like a brand new machine, and I have more storage than ever.
I too will now always use an SSD as my system disk on machines that I use regularly.
Due to the costs, it make make financial sense to order a new Mac with a 7200rpm HDD, and then do and upgrade to make the HDD secondary storage, and the SSD system and application storage. It’s the best of both worlds.
“We are Borg. Resistance is futile. Your technological distinctiveness will adapt to use SSD.”
If you are just typing text, then SSD would be fine. But if you have real data, you need real storage.
SSD still looks like floppies by comparison.
Now if a MacBook Pro could have SSD for the OS and apps and an HD for storage, that would be a laptop made in heaven!
Now that I would like to see! Keep the MBP the same size, replace the Optical drive with an SSD for the OS, and then I can have a 750GB HDD for all the apps and projects I use on a regular basis. 🙂
Are you listening, Tim Cook and Jony Ive? 😀
. . . adding to my comment above,
Swap out my DVD so I could have SSD AND a HD and we may have something.
Tried an OWC SSD in my Mac Pro under Snow Leopard and it was nice except it had issues with awaking from sleep. Went back to regular HD.
Maybe it’s time to try it again.
Last week I was running Lion on a 2.5 GHz i5 Mac Mini with 4 GB of RAM and a 500 MB 5400 rpm HD. The speed was astounding. So I don’t quite know exactly what Robin Harris is talking about.
I will point out that Lion has some problems keeping up with me on my old MacBook 2GHz Core 2 Duo, 3 MB RAM, 500 MB 5400 rpm from 2006-11. Then again, that machine is crawling with added processes I’ve installed. Cutting back on the background processes, especially certain RAM hog apps, makes a bigger difference than adding an SSD IMHO.
Well, I’m surprised your MBP runs at all with just 3 MB! JK. I know what you meant… Upgrading to 8GB of RAM may make a difference and is an inexpensive investment.
Runs at all?! I have a mere 860 MB on my 9600 running Mac OS X 10.3 Server on the Internet 24/7. It runs great.
Anyone remember when Mac OS great on 512K?
Actually: 3GB is all that I can stuff into my 2006-11 MacBook. I very easily eat up all that RAM with the stuff I run. I will be stuffing 16GB into my nifty new Mac Mini. NeeYaHaHa!