[OFB Cafe] SSDs

[Fred A. Miller]

On 11/27/2011 10:35 PM, Timothy Butler wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> While I'm here: I'm tired of the slow 500 GB drive in my MacBook Pro. I think it might also have issues. Sometimes the system becomes unable to write to the drive or things grind close to a halt. The fsck checks have always come up clean, but it acts like something is wrong. Weird.
>
> In any case, in part, it is just slow, which is bad for pushing through bunches of RAW photos. I thought about going with a hybrid drive, but kept waiting for a 1tb Momentus XT... which has never appeared. Finally, I've decided I'd be OK without more space -- that more speed would be better.
>
> So, I'm looking at an SSD. I'm leaning towards a Crucial (Micron) 512 GB drive, but I'm not sure I can quite justify pulling the trigger on the price. Yet, with 160 GB of data already on my drive (not including my photos, which are mostly stored on a FW800 drive), 256 GB sounds too small if the drive is going to last for any length of time.
>
> Thoughts on capacity and, most importantly, brand? Would the Crucial drive be a good choice? Circuit City has the 512 GB one for $729. I've seen the 256 GB one for well under $400.

My view, for what it's worth, is that I'd want to find out what's going 
on with the current drive. You don't have much on it, and the Mac file 
system shouldn't fragment very much, although it is possible, especially 
if you're running any MickySoft OS on it!

If might be worth moving all data off of the drive and onto an external 
drive, clean up the drive, then move it all back just to see if you get 
the speed back. When I recently built this desktop, I considered storage 
options and once again found that presently, there's just not a good 
incentive to get any SSD, in particular if you have the newer SATA which 
is 6G transfer. So, I have 2 1T drives. You mentioned RAW files, and 
that is another reason I made this choice, as the RAW files from my 
Canon are 21 to 23MB and when converted to tifs are 51 to 53MB. Some of 
the restorations I do are over 900MB (tif), so I need the volume of 
storage as well as a LOT of horse power and RAM. The "old" box was slow 
and it simply took too long to get any work done, so I think I know 
where you're coming from on this one.

Fred

-- 
Liberal ideology and political correctness, infused with
public policy, begets social insanity. - Michael Savage