SSD Performance

[bzb]

Hi guys

If you want real speed with Phocus and everything else on your machine, try SSD's!

Amazing speed!
Thumbnails in Phocus showing up immediately.

Great!

Ben

[christianhough]

I hear they are quick, but also have a very limited life-span, especially if you're constantly buffering large files?

Best
Christian

[bzb]

Buy a OWC SSD:
http://eshop.macsales.com/

Install, forget about maintenance and be happy!

[HLArt]

I hear they are quick, but also have a very limited life-span, especially if you're constantly buffering large files?

Best
Christian

I work with a MacbookPro 15" since Mai 2010 with a SSD inside, all my hassipics go over this machine now around 17.000 shots without any problem. With the AppleCare Protection Plan I see no risk.
Kr

[Dustbak]

I have a Crucial C300 in my laptop. 2 years of working and about 50K of images went through this machine. No problems. I have an OWC SSD in my MacPro which is also just fine. 1 significant detail that is kind of odd. The Crucial SSD boots and works faster than the OWC! It takes less than 10 seconds to boot my laptop! Much more with the OWC. In general use the Crucial also feels faster.

[christianhough]

I've just ordered my i7 MacBook Pro with the standard HDD. I may try a SSD in about a year or so when they come down in price and increase in capacity. Does it have a big impact of the battery life?

Best
Christian
www.christianhough.com

[Dustbak]

Not sure how much it impacts battery life. I virtually immediately changed my drive for a SSD so I cannot compare. It should have an impact. I do notice my laptop does not make a lot of sound and it doesn't get as hot as my previous MBP.

Biggest thing is that it really speeds up capturing because of its fast write speed. I also really appreciate it I can reboot in a very short period of time. On more than one occassion I ran into trouble and needed to reboot. With the SSD my stress levels of having to reboot have gone way down.

[Andy Johnson-Laird]

Not sure how much it impacts battery life. I virtually immediately changed my drive for a SSD so I cannot compare. It should have an impact. I do notice my laptop does not make a lot of sound and it doesn't get as hot as my previous MBP.

Biggest thing is that it really speeds up capturing because of its fast write speed. I also really appreciate it I can reboot in a very short period of time. On more than one occassion I ran into trouble and needed to reboot. With the SSD my stress levels of having to reboot have gone way down.

I second what Dustbak says. I have two MacBook Pro's running Crucial C300's and one Mac Pro. Blazingly fast to reboot and to execute apps. Photoshop and Phocus both run much faster. I do fret that the MacBook's run really hot when working flat out -- I was pondering whether the speed of the SSDs means that the CPU cores can run faster(and thus hotter) because of the lack of disk latency, so I tend to rest the MacBooks on Logitech's N200 cooling pads -- the cores run much cooler (as reported by iStat) and the human's "lap" is much cooler too.  .

There are reports of some SSDs needing their host computers to use the TRIM command to deal with "disk" fragmentation issues, but as far as I can tell, Darwin's  (the operating system under OS X Leopard, Snow Leopard and Loin (sic)) file system does not need to use the TRIM command. I've not researched this to point where I can know for sure, but I've not seen any problems reported regarding premature failure of SSDs in Macs.

Based on my own experiences, any future Macs I buy that have spinny thingies in them will immediate get replaced by SSDs. Hopefully the price/capacities of SSDs will drop to the point that one could build, say, a 6TB RAID for video editing without incurring a significant chunk of the U.S. national debt. Nobody seems interested in raising *my* debt ceiling.

Regards
Andy