question about SSDs

I am thinking of buying a mbp and also thinking of getting an SSD for it.

I checked out the reviews on newegg for some of the more popular SSDs and there are people that report the performance is getting worse as the time passes by. Some people complain about how the SDD blocks the entire computer for a second or two until it does some house keeping. Other people say they are great. Some people reported failures after a period of time (usually under a year). Others say that they are not good if you do development and compile often, operation that creates lots of small files (which apparently are not good for performance).

Frankly, I don't know what to think anymore. They are expensive compared to the other types of HDDs. I hate to spend the money and discover 6 months from now that they become as fast as a regular hdd. I have used a momentus xt for a while on windows 7 and I am very happy with it, but some people reported problems with it on mbp. I might as well get a regular hdd and wait until the technology matures more.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

 

At work, my Dell laptop has a Kingston SSD drive that gets hammered very often with software development chores. I've had that laptop with the SSD drive for about 2 solid months now and it is still holding up very strong. Based on that, I'd say SSD drives are now reasonably well-made making them great options for boosting system performance. The only drawback now is the cost per GB, but the prices are coming down.

Based on my observations with my work machine, I decided to pick up an SSD drive a few days ago for my MBP13. I got the Crucial C300 (64GB), and also have a Seagate 500GB (7200 RPM) drive sitting in the optical bay area of the laptop. So far it's running great, and I've just installed a Windows 7 virtual machine on the SSD drive to get fast boot times with it. It's blowing me away in speed now.

Time will tell how the Crucial drive holds up. I'll see in a month how it fares.

 

OS X Lion is supposed to support the performance maintenance drive "housekeeping" function that the second poster's Dell already has in Windows (TRIM).

I notice that quite a few magazine writers are applauding the change that Lion will have, that many here said was un-needed.

 

From the research I've done yesterday it seems that three good options would be intel x25, owc and ocz vertex 2. owc & ocz vertex 2 use the sandforce controller and apparently the performance doesn't degrade in time. However if you look on newegg, there are quite a few people that reported failures of ocz vertex 2 ( Newegg.ca - OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G 2.5" 120GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD).

I wonder about owc...

Another good one is the intel x25-m but it seems to be pricey but there are no real negative reviews on newegg for the 120gb model!

For me the reliability trumps over the speed.

I also frown upon the tests that people usually do when it comes to SSDs. For instance, testing boot times or applications startups. How many times a day do I start an app and the laptop. Only once. And, yes, when I start my computer I go to grab a cup of coffee

I think the speed is good whenever you have to compile stuff, and when you use software that creates lots of files. But if you do an average of all activities you do in a day, I wonder how much time you actually save. To use a comparison, it is like having two cars that have to get from point A to point B, one slower and the other one faster. The fact that the second car is faster might be of no big consequence to the overall time of the trip, if there are lots of stops between A and B. The stops are our activities such as typing, or thinking, or designing using drag & drop. And hey, if you are in downtown, a bike (not motorbike) might get you faster from A to B

Of course I am talking about using SSDs on a client workstation. It is a different story for servers.

 

You should probably check out the hardware section for much more SSD info. A lot of people here avoid OCZ due to their poor business practices.

 

I have an ExpressCard SSD on my MacBook Pro which I put in last September. It seemed like a relatively inexpensive and unobtrusive way to try an SSD. The performance is great and I haven't had any problems with it. I get the best of both worlds with an SSD for OS+Apps and an HDD for data.

I have the Intel X25-M on my Windows 7 desktop and the performance is very nice. I've only had the system for a month so I don't know what the long-term issues are but the person that helped me build it said that he's had one for quite a while with no problems and that they are generally considered quite reliable.

 

What brand?

 

Wintech file mate 48 gb.

 

Heard reports that those get pretty hot, especially under heavy use. How have you found it?

 

I haven't found any heat issues with it though I have the 17 inch MBP which has far less heat issues compared to the 15 inch MBP (my kids have the 15 inch models).

 

The FileMate is the only ExpressCard SSD that I'm aware of that you can boot Mac OS X off of. I don't know if you can boot Windows off of it. It appears that this was one of the first and a lot of people bought it because it works.