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What does and doesn't actually speed up your Mac

chscag

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vansmith

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One important piece missing from that list: repairing permissions is the not end-all, cure-all, fix-all that is sometimes appear. If your machine is running slow, repairing permissions isn't going to help.
 

pigoo3

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Nice little article there Charlie. I'm glad to see a good amount of what was mentioned we already "preach" here on Mac-Forums.:) Of course the SSD info does take some "real" laboratory testing.

Thanks for posting a link to it!:)

- Nick
 
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Pretty much everything they posted is what we keep telling everyone.
The additional monitor is a little yes and no. They claimed there was no performance hit. But the way they tested it, does not show real results. I will explain. While plugging up extra monitors in most cases does not slow down the computer as a whole. It will effect GPU performance because the RAMDAC must now digital to analog signals for multiple displays, or as the RAMDAC sees it, just twice as many pixels now. Also if you are running a GPU intensive program on monitor A and something else or even just the desktop on monitor B. There will be a performance hit to Monitor A and some to B as well. Now this is a very minor hit to almost not noticeable for normal desktop usage. It inherently will always be.



This is what came to mind when I first read the thread title.. hehe

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NOS Stickers! They want speed up your computer, but will make you look like a real gear head! :Cool:
 
C

chas_m

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What "speeds up" your Mac: replacing the HD with an SSD.
What keeps your Mac running well: all the things mentioned in the article
What doesn't speed up your Mac: any software program that claims it will speed up your Mac.
 
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Seeing that the fill rate of the SSD not affecting the performance until it is 97% filled filled me with joy. I became a useless files detector and eraser after I moved from my desktop which had 2 TB space to a Mac with 128 GB SSD.

But I'm not sure if that is really true.
 

RavingMac

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Thanks for sharing. Makes me glad I opted for the 480 GB SSD, rather than trying to squeeze into the 240.
 
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Seeing that the fill rate of the SSD not affecting the performance until it is 97% filled filled me with joy. I became a useless files detector and eraser after I moved from my desktop which had 2 TB space to a Mac with 128 GB SSD.

But I'm not sure if that is really true.

The reason a HDD slows down is due to the placement of the data on the platers of the HDD. When data first gets placed on the drive, it is placed to the center of the drive. Thus when the arm that holds the read/write heads moves, it has a shorter distance to move to gather the data. When it has to move to the outside of the platters the segments are generally spaced further apart due to rotation speed and it takes the drive longer to find and move the data.

A SSD on the other hand, it just RAM chips and no mechanical slow downs are present..


Hope this explains..
 
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chscag

chscag

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Thanks for sharing. Makes me glad I opted for the 480 GB SSD, rather than trying to squeeze into the 240.

Yeah Mike, that part of the article surprised me when I read it. That's a good reason for avoiding the small cheap SSDs we often see advertised. It does make me wonder how effective the fusion drives that Apple offers are? It seems to me unless you opt for a large fusion drive, you may be better off spending money on the same machine with better standard specs.
 
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Yeah Mike, that part of the article surprised me when I read it. That's a good reason for avoiding the small cheap SSDs we often see advertised. It does make me wonder how effective the fusion drives that Apple offers are? It seems to me unless you opt for a large fusion drive, you may be better off spending money on the same machine with better standard specs.

Fusion drive has its pros and cons. But here is the short and simple version. The fusion drive what I can tell works as a JBOD array with one exception. The Flash storage side of the fusion drive works as disk cache. So when files are moved onto the fusion drive they are moved first to the flash storage, then later the data is then moved to permanent storage on the regular HDD part of the array. As far as the OS is located. Don't shoot me if I am wrong, but I don't think all of the OS is on the flash storage side, I know the kernel and pretty much all the kernel modules must be on the flash storage to start the JBOD up. But I believe the rest of the OS like the built in applications are actually located on the HDD side of the house. Which corresponds with many claiming its fast, but not as fast as a pure SSD.

So the pros are that data is fast getting written (at least until the buffer is full). Faster then normal startup. Much larger storage without multiple drive locations.

The cons, slow read speeds common to HDDs. MTBF is double due to two disk in the JBOD array.


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Now in regards to why SSDs are faster the larger they are. I think this has to do with independent memory banks working in parallel with each other. Thus creating more memory bandwidth and thus faster transfer speeds. If I am explaining this correctly..

I knew this when I got my Samsung 256GB 830 series, but 512 was the largest then and way to over priced. Plus I think at the time the 512 was only about 50 to 100MB/s faster. Perhaps due to other reasons, so I am not certain. But the 256 was the best price/performance/capacity at the time.
 

Slydude

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Thanks for sharing. Makes me glad I opted for the 480 GB SSD, rather than trying to squeeze into the 240.

I thought the same thing when I skimmed that article last night, I just ordered an SSD yesterday. I stretched the budget a bit and went for a 480 GB as well. Kinda glad I did.
 
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chscag

chscag

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I stretched the budget a bit and went for a 480 GB as well. Kinda glad I did.

I'll be glad to see prices start coming down - which we should see this year as more and more of the NAND modules are being produced. I didn't order a SSD when I bought my 2013 iMac last year. Just couldn't really afford to lay out another $500 for a large SSD to replace the 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" drive that came standard. And I didn't have any faith in ordering a Fusion drive - actually, I still don't have much faith in them. ;)
 

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Disk Utility says my main internal drive is fine Tech Tool Pro reports some bad blocks but suggests S.M.A.R.T. status is fine. A utility that Randy mentioned in another thread reports S.M.A.R.T status as failing and also reports the bad blocks. I decided to replace the drive rather than push my luck.

I had been putting off getting an SSD due to cost. This is a 2008 machine after all and it has been run hard almost every day. I finally chose the SSD because I can use the speed boost. If the machine fails in the near future I'll pull the SSD and use it elsewhere.
 

RavingMac

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I have been very pleased so far with the upgrade, though after reading the article I wish now I had gone with 8 rather than 16GB RAM.
 
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Sly if SMARTReporter is indicating a failing drive, simply don't trust the drive.
 

Slydude

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Sly if SMARTReporter is indicating a failing drive, simply don't trust the drive.

I don't. That's what prompted the purchase of the SSD.
 
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Yea if you getting Bad Blocks, regardless of what SMART is reporting. Then the drive may not directly be failing, but just getting wore out/ old. If they makes sense.

So yea SSD that bad boy and breath some new life into your machine. Warning though.. Once you get a SSD you will never want to use a regular HDD as your system drive again..
 
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MacInWin

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The reason a HDD slows down is due to the placement of the data on the platers of the HDD. When data first gets placed on the drive, it is placed to the center of the drive. Thus when the arm that holds the read/write heads moves, it has a shorter distance to move to gather the data. When it has to move to the outside of the platters the segments are generally spaced further apart due to rotation speed and it takes the drive longer to find and move the data.

A SSD on the other hand, it just RAM chips and no mechanical slow downs are present..


Hope this explains..
Actually, modern drives use Zone Bit Recording (ZBR) which adds more blocks to tracks further from the spindle. Instead of having the same number of blocks on each track, the longer tracks at the outer edge have more blocks, hence more data. The tracks are grouped in zones of adjacent tracks and the number of block in the zone increases from the center out by zone. The object is to have the bits/second remain relatively constant as the heads move from the faster outer tracks to the slower inner tracks.

As a result of this technology, the fastest transfers from disks now occur on the outer tracks, so the drives use the space there first, then move inward to where there are fewer zones and slower data transfers. The tracks are all the same distance apart, so the fact that outer tracks have more data in them mean that the heads can sit on one track longer, reducing the total time to transfer because there are fewer head movements on the outer tracks.
 

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