03-05-2011, 03:54 AM

Just wondering if anybody knows how the solid state hard drives stack-up. Please let me know.

03-05-2011, 04:05 AM

SSD, 7200rpm, then 5400rpm.
SSD's are substantially faster, however, overpriced for the storage size that you get.
In most cases, for the average user, it is not worth it.
Value for money until SSDs drop drastically in price (become the standard drives), go for a 7200rpm drive.
Keep in mind that you're not going to notice much other than boot time and application launching being faster unless you are doing some intensive graphic design, photo/video editing, music recording, etc.

03-05-2011, 06:54 AM

Originally Posted by moreguns

Just wondering if anybody knows how the solid state hard drives stack-up. Please let me know.

They are fast! See:
Charts, benchmarks SSD Charts 2010, Desktop Performance Index (50% Throughput, 25% PCMark, 25% I/O)

SSD's tend to be far less prone to failure due to jarring and impact as traditional hard drives are.

But SSD's are prone to wear-out in time, and, especially when used in a Mac, can suffer from poor handling of bad blocks. OS X 10.6 and earlier don't support TRIM:
TRIM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I keep on hearing about SSD's having abnormally high failure rates and
unusual problems:
SSDs Have High Failure Rate? - HotHardware
SSD failure rate is '10-20 per cent' | News | TechRadar UK
(There were reports that Dell had as high as a 30% return rate for
laptops with SSD's, which Dell refutes. However, Dell has refused to
disclose the actual return rate.)

I just recently learned that TRIM will be supported and implemented in OS X 10.7:
Mac OS X Lion Supports TRIM for SSD’s
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Developer Preview is Available to Download

So, if you are interested in an SSD, it might be best to wait until this summer when Apple releases OS X 10.7. By then SSD's might also be generally more reliable.

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

03-05-2011, 07:21 AM

Even though OS X doesn't support TRIM, SSDs for reasons unbeknown to myself, seem to not suffer from the degradation that they do with other OS's.
Don't ask me why, as I don't know, but if you do your research on this, you may get your explanations!

03-05-2011, 07:55 AM

Originally Posted by 6string

Even though OS X doesn't support TRIM, SSDs for reasons unbeknown to myself, seem to not suffer from the degradation that they do with other OS's.
Don't ask me why, as I don't know, but if you do your research on this, you may get your explanations!

That's very true, at least for the Samsung SSD that Apple provides for the Macbook Air. On the other hand, the performance provided by the Samsung SSD in the Macbook Air is terrible compared to the speed of just about any other SSD, and even many rotating disk hard drives.

The situation is much less clear for other SSD's.

This article discusses that and does testing for SSD drive performance
degradation, does some comparison with similar testing on a Windows 7
computer and SSD drives and comes to some surprising conclusions.
Benchmarking SSD performance in OSX | bit-tech.net

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

03-05-2011, 08:05 AM

The word on these so far is pretty good

OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD Serial ATA 2.5" Solid State Drives using High Performance SandForce Processor solution

03-05-2011, 06:00 PM

Apparently Apple is already providing TRIM support for their SSDs that are installed in the new MBP line. See this article.

03-05-2011, 06:22 PM

Originally Posted by chscag

Apparently Apple is already providing TRIM support for their SSDs that are installed in the new MBP line. See this article.

According to this article, it has been added to the latest build of the 10.6.6 update available through software update from Apple.
Obviously, I can't test this having no SSD installed

03-05-2011, 06:48 PM

Use a Mercury Extreme SSD and it is the bees knees.

Have a read of this particularly page 7and do not worry about TRIM:-


http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/app...-trim-in-osx/1