Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not using one in a production web environment, but my Macbook Pro has one in it now and it's phenomenal. Photoshop boots up in quite literally 3 seconds or less (cold startup) and every other action imaginable is noticeably quicker. I used to feel like browsing files in the Finder was slower than it was for me on my old Windows XP machines but eventually I got used to it. I use keyboard navigation as well, so it felt even slower. (For anyone interested, arrow keys, and command+downarrow to open a folder, command+uparrow to go to the parent folder).

Now that I've got an SSD as a boot drive, navigating the Finder is significantly faster. It feels so quick. Folders open instantly. When I got my development environment up and running (nginx, uwsgi, django, mysql, etc...) I noticed that code compiles wayyy quicker too.

Love it! For the record... I've got the Intel X-25M, second generation. It's only 80GB (they're pricey!) so I also picked up an MCE Optibay which is basically a hollowed out superdrive that lets you mount an additional HD where your DVD drive sits. It also includes an external enclosure so that you can put your otherwise useless SATA DVD drive to use via USB. So now my MBP has two drives in it, an 80gb ssd to boot off of and a 320gb regular drive for bulk storage (media, photos, etc..)

Gotta give credit where credit is due... Paul Stamatiou's blog came in handy a few times with aiming me in the right direction with this. Here is a nifty article from his blog, which describes most of what I did other than the RAID part (which I did not do). http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-apple-macbook-pro-raid-0-arr...

My SSD RAID 0 setup is still chugging along like a beast! Now I'm just curious how much faster it would be if I swapped the X25-M's out for dual Crucial C300's...

As I noted in that article though - SSD RAID 0 on a Mac is a danger zone because there's no TRIM. My first single, non-raid SSD (X25-M G1) died after 9 months of typical development usage. So I backup like a banshee. The speed boost is worth the risk though.

I got one when I bought my new laptop, and between SSDs and Windows Seven it has been the greatest productivity boost I've ever gotten out of a hardware upgrade in literally a decade. My machine now screams -- going from a cold boot I can get Chrome open before wireless handshakes are complete.

I would like to think of a clever follow up, but 'ditto'. I keep my 1TB hard drive as a long-term storage solution but otherwise all productivity has been moved to the SSD and boot times are in seconds.

It's a cool drive. But if you were really using one in production etc, it's not like you'd need a Mac! Everyone thinks that every where I go and it's like a disease actually. Macbook is absolutely worthless in terms of raw computing power. You pay double and get a computer 1/2 the speed, but most people think you get a computer double the speed. Simple example: I got an i7 based pc at 4ghz that will out render any typical $1600 imac, or the $2000, or $2500 pro. It cost $730. I also work with video and audio in a studio etc. I think the thing that irks me is every last macbook pro user tends to buy ssd first because they spend tons of cash easily. But then they are always determined to say "I use it on MY Macbook pro". To me this is not a sign of professionalism, but lack of understanding. It's not like most will run final cut pro. But most use adobe software anyway, which runs on windows 7 just fine. And there are other alternatives about as good as fcp for windows 7. Some of which are used to create very pro looking videos that have gotten famous on youtube. Search cows cows cows. There are thousands of others. But every last SSD review has some mac guy explaining how good the ssd works in a mac, lol. But I will agree on part of this. Mac's are typically slower, and their hard drives usually are terrible. So, it makes sense I suppose. And I know there are POS pc's. But with a little shopping around and looking, you can buy stuff better than a mac for 1/2 th ecost.

by the way. I realize there are a couple of macs $3000 and higher that have more cores. For that I'd just upgrade my board to dual cpu version and the computer would cost me $1200 and still be faster than the fastest mac on the market. In fact I could just hackintosh it and have a mac faster than what apple sells, and some do that. But I prefer windows 7.

Very interesting. Do you notice any slow down over time? I think I'm right in saying that OSX doesn't implement the trim command or something like that?

This is correct (no support for TRIM), but the performance degradation is not very significant. I'm certain I've used all blocks on my SSD and it's still way faster than HD for random access. Sequential write is noticably slower, but that doesn't happen often -- copying a large backup, etc, but then I can do something else or get a drink while waiting. Random = interactive = fast.

Intel's SSDs don't perform worse if you don't use TRIM. They pre-erase and move blocks of data around in background so that when you go to write there is always some space to do so.

The downside is that sequential writes are bandwidth-limited compared to other SSDs, but this doesn't matter in practice with small random writes completing very quickly.

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