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My employer was going to get me the OWC 6G 480 GB SSD from here: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6G/ This will be for a 2010 MacBook Pro, currently loaded with a 512 GB 7200RPM drive. I'm only using ~250 Gigs, but hit all kinds of I/O issues from running tons of programs and virtual machines at the same time. I figured an SSD would be a decent upgrade. Now, are there any reasons I should not get that drive? Do I need to enable trim, or does the drive have some sort of built-in trim?
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Jun 12, 2012 17:29
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dietcokefiend posted:The OWC SSDs are rock solid and for Apple hardware noone comes close to the level of support they offer. OWC doesn't recommend enabling TRIM on their SSDs for OSX, although you can still do it if you want. Their argument is the SandForce garbage collection works better on its own without TRIM enabled. Do they conflict with each other / cause problems? What about when I've booted to Windows 7? Will Windows try to enable TRIM itself, even if a drive has built-in garbage collection? The last hard drive we purchased was $80. I don't want to buy an $800 drive and find out I'm going to have all kinds of issues with it.
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Jun 12, 2012 18:46
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When I buy a new hard drive, the first thing I do it test it. 1) write zeros to the drive 2) run "MHDD" to scan and give a visual readout of the surface of the disk. Is there something like that I could do with a SSD? I understanding "writing zeros" actually fills all the cells with data, and doesn't empty anything. How do I know if all the cells function?
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Jun 13, 2012 23:59
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Well, the OWC "6G" 480GB drive just showed up. Just pop it in and go, right? I don't have to align partitions or anything like that? 2010 MacBook Pro, Mac OS X 10.7/10.8, and Windows 7 x64 will be the only things on it.
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Jun 14, 2012 23:39
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OK, this OWC 480GB SSD is nothing short of loving amazing. No issues with install. I popped it in my Mac, installed 10.7 through its EFI Recovery without the need for any installation media (when are PCs getting this poo poo???). With Mac OS X installed, I then ran the Boot Camp installer, set it to 340GB Mac, 120GB Windows. Windows 7 installed and had TRIM enabled already. I ran Trim Enabler under Mac OS X to enabler it there. I'm getting 266+ MB/sec sustained. The drive is far more capable than that (550+ MB/sec), but this is just a SATA2 system. Mac OS X boots in ~15 seconds, and then it can load a Windows XP and Windows 7 virtual machines (at the same time) in another ~15 seconds after that. Zero wait for any application to load. This is a much bigger improvement than what I get out of complete systems upgrades.
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Jun 20, 2012 18:17
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Factory Factory posted:Unless you have an Intel, Crucial, Samsung, or some varieties of Toshiba drive, SSDs fail at pretty much the same rate as hard drives. SSDs fail at the same rate as HDDs?? WTF? People have had hard drives failing on them at alarming rates for the past 30 years. SSDs boast their durable, solid-state-ness. You should be able to read/write to them while beating them with a hammer constantly for more years than you'd ever want to use them. They're also pretty new, how can there be data already stating they are just as lovely as the HDD designs that started coming out in the 1980s?
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Jun 22, 2012 06:33
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Due to how pleased I am with my 480GB OWC SSD, after being asked for a "cheap" SSD recommendations, I've pointed a client to these: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDEX6G060/ $93 (SSD + 3.5" bracket) for a 60GB SSD. They will be used with Linux and XP systems, so the built-in garbage-collection makes them stand out. They mostly want them for the speed and reliability. They may even be going from some 160-320 GB HDDs, and the smaller drive is to encourage more people to move their crap to our network storage instead of saving everything locally.
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Jun 29, 2012 22:45
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Alereon posted:For $74.99 you can get a Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe with adapter, and it's using the much superior Synchronous NAND versus the Asynchronous used in the OWC drive, which helps with the performance penalty from using such a small drive. And those have the built-in garbage-collection? I'm reading now on synchronous vs asynchronous, and it seems worth it. It looks like the OWC "Extreme" line (what my 480GB drive is) has Synchronous NAND.
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Jun 30, 2012 23:37
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Binary Badger posted:Don't use Trim Enabler for Macs. All it does is switch a critical kext from Snow Leopard into Lion, and probably breaks poo poo deep inside the system because of all the internal OS dependencies. It's the Windows equivalent of mixing and matching DLLs between XP and Vista and hoping everything keeps working. The point of using the current version of Trim Enabler on a Mac is that it does NOT install the kext from 10.6. It patches the existing 10.7 kext just like the manual method you posted. It simply gives you a 1-button way of doing it. The article you linked on doing it manually is a year old. The current/easy way is to just use Trim Enabler.
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Jul 2, 2012 15:19
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Alereon posted:To be fair, that Macsales post is from a direct competitor to OCZ and should be viewed with skepticism. Do they not make valid points? They say their stuff is good, OCZ stuff is bad. They don't tell you not to buy Intel, Crucial, etc; just to be aware of what companies put in their drives. quote:Unless the brand of SSD you are buying clearly specifies the key internal components used – there are better – and perhaps more reliable – choices on the market.
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Jul 7, 2012 08:04
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Yeah, getting an SSD for MacBook Pro (2010) gave a bigger jump in performance than from any CPU or RAM upgrade I've purchased. I'm actually wanting PATA SSD upgrades for all my old systems. I use my ThinkPad T43 all the time, and it could really use a nice SSD. Lenovo gave it a PATA interface, though! (it has a SATA chipset with an internal SATA to PATA bridge.)
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Jul 8, 2012 04:11
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OK, I had this 60GB SSD recommended to me on here because it uses synchronous NAND: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-226-246 Is this the 120GB version of it? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226318 Mushkin seems to have 100 drives, with regular names, names with Deluxe, then names with Deluxe MX. What does" MX" mean? Is MX better than non MX? For our Linux/XP systems, 60GB should be fine. If we start putting Windows 7 on these, we're gonna end up with mostly-full drives.
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Jul 12, 2012 19:59
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Space Gopher posted:What are you doing? Scientific software usage. Sorta like business desktop use. I'm not going for mad speed, but having something "a little bit faster" for not that much more is a bonus. I'm more interested in the SandForce controller. Googling Mushkin's regular vs. MX vs. DX gave me some forum links with these two bits of info: quote:The Chronos uses async NAND, the MX uses sync NAND and the DX uses premium sync NAND. quote:The DX uses Toshiba Toggle NAND, currently the best NAND, the MX does not.
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Jul 12, 2012 23:48
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OK, I think I'm going to finally upgrade to SSD on my main Desktop when I move to Windows 8. I'm a fan of SandForce controllers, because I like the idea that the drive has its own built-in garbage collection just in case I decide to load DOS or OS/2 Warp on it (or any other OS that lacks TRIM). My work MacBook Pro has an OWC (not OCZ) "Extreme" 480 Gig SSD w/ SandForce. I have a $100 Micro Center gift card, and was thinking about putting it towards the Samsung 830 256GB. That doesn't have a SandForce controller. Does its controller do garbage-collection (just in case I use an OS without TRIM)? Edit: What is up with these model numbers for the 830/256GB? Micro Center: MZ-7PC256D/AM, $220 NewEgg: MZ-7PC256D/AM, $220 MZ-7PC256B/WW, $200 MZ-7PC256N/AM, $220 Xenomorph fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Sep 30, 2012 |
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Sep 30, 2012 05:17
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Who is this OCZ and why are they so lovely? I haven't heard anything about them except to "avoid them". Everything from shipping out replacement drives that had different internals with the same model number (screwing up someone's RAID) to having a crazy-high failure rates. If all they've done is pissed people off, how are they still around? Where did they come from? I'd think a new start-up company that just sells turds would have immediately been killed by the market. Are they part of a larger company? Packard Bell's entire business model was selling poop, so they were ran out of the US almost 20 years ago. Why is OCZ still around?
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Oct 17, 2012 15:32
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OK, I know this isn't everyone's beloved Samsung 830, but it has some stuff I like, like the SandForce 2281 (TRIM support in any goofy OS I choose to run; Mac, Linux, BSD, DOS, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, etc). SanDisk 240 GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171568 I can get that for $69.99 locally (local sale + gift-card). Is it worth it?
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Nov 21, 2012 18:02
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IOwnCalculus posted:$69.99 as in you get a GC back, or you have a GC to the place that brings your cash-out-of-pocket price to $69.99? I already have a gift card for the place. I just pay $69.99 (+ tax) out of pocket. No rebates or coupons to mess with.
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Nov 21, 2012 18:40
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IOwnCalculus posted:Ah. Well if there's nothing else there you'd use the giftcard for instead, yeah, I'd do that deal in a heartbeat. My concern was more of "is anything wrong with this particular drive?" ... firmware issues, hidden "gotchas", etc.
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Nov 21, 2012 23:28
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I just got that "SanDisk Extreme SDSSDX-240G-G25 2.5" 240GB" for hella cheap. I put it in my computer and did a clean install of Windows 8 on it. It seems Windows 8 now creates a 350 MB "System Reserved" partition on a blank drive (Windows Vista and Windows 7 made a 100 MB partition). Should I just leave that alone? When Vista first came out I'd use something like GParted to make 1 partition the full size of the disk. I have no intention of using BitLocker or whatever the boot partition is for, so I didn't know if it was recommended to try to get every last meg claimed for my main partition.
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Nov 24, 2012 03:41
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I just created one large partition on my new SSD, starting at sector 2048. I'm guessing this is the default Windows Vista/7/8 creates the partition at. One tool created the partition at sector 63, which I believe is the old location (and what causes issues with 4K aligned drives and SSDs).
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Nov 24, 2012 23:16
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uhhhhahhhhohahhh posted:If you don't use hibernation then disable it completely. For page file it depends on your RAM. If you have 8GB then a 1GB page file should be fine. At 8+ GB of RAM you don't really need one at all, you just keep it there because some programs/games won't run without one. I've seen my 8GB system use 4GB+ of its pagefile. I would *not* want to set it to just 1GB. I've used systems with 64GB of RAM that started writing to swap. The system will swap/page regardless of how much RAM is installed.
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Nov 25, 2012 05:43
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Glen Goobersmooches posted:This likely isn't relevant to your query, but for the purposes of general information hiberation.sys is actually Windows8's secret to insane boot times. Windows 8 partially *suspends* when you tell it to shutdown (and uses hiberfil.sys). It can be annoying, especially if you (rarely) shutdown for things like changing hardware or something. Reboot -> fresh OS on start. Shutdown -> previous hardware config and other stuff still in memory on the next startup. Since getting my SSD, I've been shuffling around my old hard drives (WD Black, 640 GB). I'd shut down, move some cables, boot to Linux, wipe & partition, then reboot back to Windows. Even after running DBAN, since I "shut down", the system state was saved to hiberfil.sys - including my old partition scheme!
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Nov 25, 2012 20:47
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HorseDickSandwich posted:I've been looking pretty hard at SSD's the last few days and do believe I've narrowed down my options. I know the Samsung 830 is always a viable option, but I've got two others in mind that are a bit cheaper that I think will fit my needs just fine. Those are the exact two drives I had been looking at instead of the Samsung 830 everyone seems to love (I wanted the SandForce goodness for maximum non-Windows compatibility, just in case I use this in a Mac or my Nintendo Wii or something). I've even recommended those two drives to a friend since they seem to have some of the best stuff in them (SandForce 2281 & Toggle NAND). They both perform similar in the benchmarks from what I've seen. I was leaning toward the Mushkin drive (it even comes with a 3.5" bracket), but I had a gift card to Micro Center, and the SanDisk was the only thing they had locally. I got the SanDisk this past Friday and have been having a blast with it. Hella fast. Just make sure to load the latest firmware (mine came with the older one). The latest firmware is from October, so any reviews before then that mention TRIM or performance issues may not apply now. I know SanDisk even provides alternative, enhanced compatibility firmware for the device for use in certain Macs (it helps it when used with some NVidia chipsets used in some Macs). The Mushkin is slightly older, I believe (6-8 months older than the SanDisk, maybe), so that may mean it has a more "proven" track record. It was recommended in the OP, as well.
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Nov 26, 2012 17:35
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Welp. Time to get another SSD to hold my ever-growing swap/page/hibernation/startup files.
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Nov 29, 2012 04:46
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Caged posted:The OP says regarding Macs: A Samsung drive provided by Apple will have working TRIM automatically done by the OS, but not one you buy yourself. OS-based TRIM is only enabled on drives provided by Apple (they may have Apple's firmware on them, an Apple logo on their sticker, etc). If you buy a Samsung drive from some random retailer, TRIM will not be enabled by the OS, and the drive itself does not do its own built-in garbage collection. There is a way to hex-edit a system file or just use a 3rd-party program called "TRIM enabler" to modify the system file to force-enable the OS-based TRIM. That method/program work fine for most people (as far as I know). Basically, you hack your OS to enable TRIM support. On the other hand, SandForce drives are favored by a lot of "non Windows" users, as it doesn't matter if you're using a Mac, Windows XP, DOS, BeOS, PlayStation 3, or whatever, the drive itself has the built-in garbage collection. You just pop it in and go. OWC (not to be confused with OCZ) makes its own SandForce-based drives for Mac, and recommends going with SandForce drives with built-in TRIM instead of relying on OS-based TRIM. http://blog.macsales.com/11051-to-trim-or-not-to-trim-owc-has-the-answer (Of course, since they make drives with the built-in TRIM, they are going to tell people that they should only buy drives with built-in TRIM.) Some like the idea of the "over provisioning" of the SandForce drives: 256GB flash -> 240GB usable, with 16GB for RAISE error-recovery (auto-replaces bad cells if any are found during the life of the drive). I don't know how important this is; I didn't see much talk about it in the OP. The Samsung is regarded as really reliable, and its probably too early to know of issues of cell failure. Most SSD failures I've heard about are just total device failure, not cell failure. It's still a pretty new technology. Maybe in 5-10 years, when the "reliable" drives have lived their full life, individual cell death may be more noticeable. For our work systems (MacBook Pros), we picked up a few 480GB OWC drives (SandForce 2281). For desktops/other workstations at work, we picked up some of them nice Toggle NAND Mushkin drives (SandForce 2281). For my home computer, I picked up a nice Toggle NAND SanDisk drive (SandForce 2281).
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Nov 29, 2012 13:12
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HalloKitty posted:Nope, Samsung 830 does have idle-time garbage collection AnandTech doesn't seem to like the "idle-time" part of that. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4863/the-samsung-ssd-830-review/6 quote:My biggest issue with Samsung SSDs in the past has been their extremely poor performance over time. Samsung doesn't do a lot of active garbage collection while writing in order to maintain ultra high write speeds, instead it prefers to clean up the drive during periods of little to no IO activity. Unfortunately this approach can result in pretty poor performance over time. quote:Performance drops significantly, down to as low as 50MB/s for the earliest LBAs. Given enough idle time the 830 should correct much of this and obviously TRIMing those LBAs will restore full performance (as you'll see below) but the point is that by delaying the bulk of garbage collection the Samsung SSD 830 is able to drop in performance by a degree that I'm not super comfortable with. This phenomenon isn't exclusive to Samsung, you'll remember that we've complained about it with Crucial drives as well. Other than SandForce and Intel most controller manufacturers tend to follow a similar clean up the mess later approach to firmware design. In my opinion I'd much rather see lower peak performance and get higher worst case scenario performance as it tends to impact the user experience less. The SandForce drives may not have the performance of the Samsung, but average performance keeps up nicely due to active garbage-collection. If you are 101% sure that you're going to be in an OS that does its own TRIM correctly, the Samsung is of course more than fine. That is easily most of the population. But what if you want a cheaper drive for your quirky OS of choice? Space Gopher posted:Out of curiosity - how does this work? I'd think that the drive would need to be able to read the filesystem to see what blocks are marked as safe to wipe. Adding that for common filesystems like NTFS, HFS+, FAT, and so forth probably wouldn't be too hard, but without either understanding the filesystem or the OS sending TRIM hints, I don't see how it would be possible to safely discard data. It's transparent to the OS. The drive monitors writes at a block level as part of the wear leveling. The SSD hardware doesn't know if an OS is updating your file or marking it as "deleted". It simply knows it just received a write request to an area already occupied. The wear-leveling won't write to the same area twice, so it just writes the change to another area. It keeps track of the areas have had the multiple write requests made, and once an entire "block" has had its write redirected somewhere else, the garbage collection is then performed on that area. By the time that block is used again, performance has already been restored. The SSD basically does a lot of logical remapping that the OS doesn't know about. Some graphics and info here: http://thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz/garbage-collection-and-trim-in-ssds-explained-an-ssd-primer/ Xenomorph fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Nov 30, 2012 |
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Nov 30, 2012 00:45
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Caged posted:So if I'm putting a Sandforce SSD into my MacBook Pro, is there any point in running the TRIM Enabler or is it safer to just not bother with something that could potentially make the system unstable / get disabled in an update and let the SSD handle things itself? OWC says: don't enable TRIM, let the drive handle things itself. Someone from SandForce (the bottom link in my post) says: built-in garbage collection in addition to OS TRIM is best. Me: I have no idea. I *think* I have TRIM enabler set up on my Mac. When upgrading to 10.8 from 10.7, it was simply disabled. I just turned it back "on" (I believe it just does a simple byte swap on a system file, a 1 to a zero or something). It just needs to be re-enabled with each OS update. I haven't done any real tests to see how well it works.
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Nov 30, 2012 02:10
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Bob Morales posted:<-- been in the SSD club for 2 years I first got to play with an SSD setup around ~2008 or something. The ones that would freak the gently caress out during an XP install, because they couldn't handle that many little writes or something. I have a ThinkPad 560X (1995) rocking with 8GB of flash. It came with just a 4GB HDD, so upgrading to 8GB was nice.
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Nov 30, 2012 20:12
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Yaos posted:Macronix, a ROM manufacturer, discovered a way to significantly increase the life span of NAND chips. OK. How real is this? They got this crazy idea to put their SSD into an Easy Bake Oven, and it worked better than they could even imagine? Are there any other sources to this information? Going from "limited write" to "UNLIMITED writes" is a pretty big deal.
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Nov 30, 2012 23:59
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What did you use to make the image/clone? I'd just boot Clonezilla to clone the OS partition/drive, then use something like GParted after to make sure its aligned to sector 2048.
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Dec 2, 2012 09:34
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I noticed the OP was updated. No love for the SanDisk Extreme 240GB? It was one of the best options at my local Micro Center, and I know they sell out of them quickly (it and the Samsung 830 256 GB are sold out a lot there). I was wanting a Mushkin Enhanced Chronos Deluxe 240GB, but a Micro Center gift card pushed me locally to pick up a drive. They don't carry Mushkin, so that's when I discovered the SanDisk Extreme 240GB. It was reviewed quite well, and it's been out long enough to show some reliability (as well as a firmware update in October). Is it not a recommended drive? Also, as someone who loves defragging everything they own (I'm still trying to figure out how to defrag my TV), the point in the OP where it says "defragging doesn't improve performance significantly" should be expanded on. Due to logical mapping, wear leveling, and garbage-collection & TRIM shenanigans, I don't think defragging *can* alter performance on a modern SSD (significantly or not). With magnetic drives, running a defrag puts all the fun blocks together (sorta like watching a weird Tetris game, which is possibly why I like doing it so much). The data is (more or less) physically arranged on the drive as it appears in the degrag program. Ignoring the part about using up some write cycles, defragging an SSD will not place data together. Even if your defrag program shows all the blocks tightly packed together and every file in a single, contiguous block, the actual/physical data is more than certainly spread all over the drive (with many files still in thousands of fragments). The SSD has simply told the defrag program that all the data has been defragmented through the way it logically maps. Performance should be identical to how it was before the drive was defragged. So, defragging a SSD is purely a "cosmetic" procedure in the defrag program (if you like watching things defrag into neat, orderly segments), at the cost of some drive life. I'm assuming this has been discussed already. I just noticed that it has said the same old thing in OP about defragging, despite other parts being updated.
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Dec 2, 2012 10:06
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I just bake my SSD in the oven.
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Dec 3, 2012 15:08
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feld posted:might want to drop this quote in the FAQ about TRIM That sounds like the LSI/SandForce (and OWC) people talking. They say that TRIM sucks, and you should only buy ~authentic~ SandForce-powered drives.
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Dec 4, 2012 19:16
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What is the real advantage with SATA/6Gb vs SATA/3Gb? Just seeing 400-500MB/sec+ instead of 200-250MB/sec+? Coming from regular HDDs that get 50-100MB/sec, my SSD on my SATA/3Gb board easily hitting 250MB/sec+ is fast enough for me. Besides, it's the random access/zero latency thing that really seems to help stuff. That isn't improved with SATA/6Gb, is it?
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Dec 6, 2012 17:48
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Billa posted:New M4 Firmware is out! This is the same firmware that has been out for a week that has known issues with UEFI (http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Crucial-m4-SSD-040H-04MH-firmware-available-now/td-p/114274). Beware.
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Dec 11, 2012 00:17
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Trax416 posted:Thinking about picking up an ADATA SX900 256gb for $169. I have 24 hours before the sale ends. Yeah, like it was pointed out - this falls under the "do NOT buy" category. Avoid SandForce drives with sizes like 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, etc. SandForce drives should have 60GB, 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, etc.
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Dec 11, 2012 16:32
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Shaocaholica posted:Any caveats I should know about buying SSDs of unknown origin/usage? It may stop working and take all your data out.
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Dec 15, 2012 19:06
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Hadlock posted:So Ivy Bridge has two native SATA3 controllers on the die, which are spec'd for 3.0GB/s. If SATA3 is 6 Gb/s, and SATA2 is 3 Gb/s, where is this 3 GB/s number coming from?
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Dec 21, 2012 11:43
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Oh My Science posted:Haven't seen many reviews on the Sandisk drives, are they any good? Thinking about getting one for boxing day. I have the 240 GB one. Really nice. I posted some links to reviews when I got it (a few pages back). It was reviewed quite positively. Quick Toggle NAND, like the Mushkin Chronos Enhanced drives. The latest firmware for it came out in October. Before that there were no major issues - just some minor TRIM performance issues.
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Dec 26, 2012 02:12
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Binary Badger posted:What SSD's should work in these older Macs? Ain't that something - the ONLY SSDs I have are the OWC 480 GB and SanDisk Extreme 240 GB, and now you're saying they could be the most compatible, best all-around "any OS, any computer" SSDs.
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Dec 27, 2012 23:27
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