Comment by saturn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saturn | Hacker News Reader

I recently grabbed a 512GB crucial m4 for $730 delivered, from here http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ (no affiliation) (price has risen slightly since). For some reason I'd been putting it off but seeing it there for less than $1.50 per gig, at the capacity I wanted for my macbook, suddenly seemed to be a no-brainer. Hell, I remember paying $100 per gig back in the '90s. Somehow my mental model of "reasonable prices to pay for storage" has just been totally biased by years and years of dirt cheap HDDs.

Frankly it hasn't been the jaw-dropping entering-hyperdrive performance boost I had kind of hoped for (I'm a rails dev). While a definite improvement, it seems that for many of my most common tasks (read: tests) I have merely pushed the bottleneck back onto the CPU. But while it hasn't sped up all that much, it never slows down, which you don't notice at first but over time has a subtle confidence-building effect. Application launch speeds are much improved, for those who spend a good part of their day launching apps, which is not me. I tend to launch a few and then use them for the next two weeks before I restart. I also like how the drive does not make whining sounds when I move the computer before it's gone to sleep.

Recommended, anyway, they're cheap enough now that it's not a luxury, even if like me you use most of it for your work music collection.

Using someone else's sans-ssd computer will remove any doubt you have about the purchase. I occasionally have to do the usual family tech support and I find the slow response infuriating.

I ended up getting a 128GB for the OS and apps and installed a macbook optical replacement HD caddy for a 500GB drive for media. If you can deal without an optical drive this config is highly recommended.

It's strange the way people have different reactions to the SSD performance factor. I'm a rails dev too, and for me the SSD was nothing short of life-changing. When I have to go back to a non-SSD machine I get cranky.

I think the difference is because if you only do one thing at a time and you have sufficient RAM, than an SSD does almost nothing. Whereas if you have a lot of processes running and accessing files spread around the drive, and HDD will quickly send you to beach ball land.

Parallels in particular will do you in in a hurry.

I'm in the habit of running a IE7/8/9 in separate Parallels instances, Photoshop, Safari/Firefox/Chrome/Opera, MacVim, MySQL w/ 20GB of data in it, local rails server, local rails console, and iTunes or Spotify.

With an SSD I basically just run whatever I want and things slow down only very slowly and linearly as I add processes. Without an SSD I feel like if I listen to music it's going to slow things down, it adds unnecessary mental overhead to my whole workflow. The mental factor is I think why people may overstate the absolute benefit of an SSD.

"for many of my most common tasks (read: tests) I have merely pushed the bottleneck back onto the CPU."

This is my experience as well. I have an older computer (2009) with a low-voltage processor (SU3700) that I am looking at upgrading, but it's not really justifiable yet.

So I thought I'd grab an SSD for a nice performance pick-me-up now, then throw it in my new computer when I got it.

However, while there is a performance increase, it isn't really all that noticeable. (I use another computer often with an HDD, and can hardly tell the difference.) The CPU is definitely the bottleneck on most tasks.

From what I read at the time, (january 2011) sandforce based SSDs got much better performance on mac systems. I think this was to do with OSX's lack of support for TRIM.

On the other hand, right after I upgraded my SSD, I went to ruby 1.9.2 and rails 3, which are much slower due in part to a bug that makes requiring files take forever.

Not sure about others, but in my case (10 MBP 13" w/ Vertex2 in optibay), I had occasional stalls (anywhere from 2-30 sec) until the TRIM Enabler ( http://www.groths.org/?p=308 ) showed up and I installed it (OSX Lion supports TRIM on this drive natively, it seems).

I think this is because, although sandforce drives have native garbage collection, it can sometimes happen at a very inopportune moment (like say, a 20s "pause" during critical moments of a SC2 game).

By the way, do not use that Trim Enabler. If you want to and are aware of the risks, use this one, especially if you plan on using it with Lion: http://digitaldj.net/2011/07/21/trim-enabler-for-lion/

What this does is actually pretty simple, it replaces the string “Apple SSD” (used to identify for which drives trim is turned on) in a file in the relevant kernel extension with zeros. It also creates a backup copy of the original file.

The Trim Enabler you linked to replaces a whole kernel extension (meaning you might end up with an older version of a kernel extension) which is obviously monumentally stupid.

I brought the 128GB m4 and have had a similar experience. On a side note, there is a firmware upgrade that just came out that improves performance.

http://www.crucial.com/support/firmware.aspx

I felt the same way -- that I wasn't blown away by the performance -- until I got used to

  find . -iname "*java" | xargs grep ...

or ctrl-h in eclipse blowing through millions of lines of source code in 10-20 seconds instead of 3-5 minutes. I tried going back briefly while helping a friend on his laptop and waiting for grep to finish was amazingly annoying.

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