Mac Pro with solid state drives anyone?

[SonicIndustries]

Hello to all,

I am curious if anybody has built/used a MP with solid state drives.
I am researching before making a purchase and leaving micro$haft for good!!!

The new MP has 4 hard drive bays.
I would like to use multiple harddrives for my new system, however i want to do this a little differently...

bay 1: a solid state drive for the operating system and programs only
probably maybe even as 32GB would be sufficient of not 64GB

bay 2: a solid state drive for the files and music etc (regularly used)
64gb would be sufficient for this

bay 3: 2TB high speed SATA drive for movies and back ups

bay 4: 2TB high speed SATA drive ghost of the above
(back up of the back up if you like)

I wish to set things up in this way for a couple of reasons, firstly for efficiency should anything go wrong with one drive or the other, I can make repairs quickly and easily restore my system.

The other reason is that I believe the SS drives to be quicker
The final reason is that I can use smaller drives for the OS and 'My docs' because i think it pointless to have 4 x 2tb drives when currently 'my docs' is a shade over 50gb only.

Has anybody fitted SS hard drives to a MP?
Are they available from Apple from new?

All thoughts and opinion gladly received...

 

[Kash]

You don't need solid state for files and music, a regular hard drive will do just fine. Also, if you plan on accessing those files regularly, then SSD is definitely not the way to go since they have a limited number of read/write cycles so accessing it over and over will wear it out quickly. Plus, it's not like you get any sort of performance benefit, your music will play just as quickly on a 7200RPM drive.

 

[mostro]

I'm not sure if the concerns about lifespan are as relevant with the more modern SSD's as they were a few years ago. I could be wrong. Also it would depend on how long you typically keep a computer.

At any rate, there are still benefits in everyday usage from going with SSDs. Sure, you may not get the same benefit as someone who does movie editing, but check out this video to see the difference in boot and app load times between a (5400rpm) hard drive and an SSD. The 7200rpm drive might lessen that gap, but the SSD is still going to be faster.

YouTube - TUAW visits Other World Computing at Macworld Expo 2010

So it comes down to how much importance you place on fast load times (with differences in terms of seconds) and how thick your wallet is

 

[SonicIndustries]

Hello Guys, thank you both for your feedback,
I was under the impression that a SSD would be faster to work with than a mechanical drive.
I hadn't considered the issue of lifespan at all.

regarding cost, I would have thought that it would be cheaper to use a small capacity (32/64GB) SSD than a 640Gb mechanical drive?

 

[SonicIndustries]

That video is phenomenal!!!

What a difference!!!