I was going to buy an SSD to resurrect my old MacBook, then I ended up buying a new MacBook Pro with crappy 5400 rpm standard drive. FYI, I’m using Seagate Momentus XT 500GB on my old MacBook, it’s a hybrid disk with 4GB MLC SSD for read cache. So, yes, I’m desperate like an old man when using my brand new MBP with standard disk.
SSD is a new kid on the block, so popular, blazingly fast with super limited lifespan. A friend of mine bought a 240GB OCZ Vertex 2 to use with his core i5 MBP, 2 months later (now…) ended up with 20-30MB/s for write speed. Although, it’s still fast on reading, but it was able to write average 250MB/s during the first month! So, I decided won’t go with that direction, and writing this blog right now.
The Good
- Blazingly fast, nothing can beat this badass in term of writing and reading speed!
- Fast drive means faster boot time, snappier launch time and less umbrella (on Mac)
- Much much much less power! I believe Greenpeace will be happy to recommend SSD over mechanical drive!
- Less power means less heat! Good thing if you’re going to use it with core i7 MBP (it’s already hot from the factory, Intel, do something about it!)
- Better shock resistant. No moving parts means you can drop the drive without hurting it too much (if you dare to drop your $450 drive!)
- No mechanical components, mostly silicons, no platter(s) means lighter!
The Bad
SSD is a new kid on the block, just passing it’s ‘toddler’ period and now SSD is on elementary school session. So, yes, it comes with consequences, this is what you’ll barely found at hardware review sites. They simply pretend to not talk about it.
- Your $450 SSD always come with very short lifespan compared to standard HDD
- If you choose wrong, you’ll ended up with super un-reliable SSD, data gets corrupted most of the time or even lost!
- Came with tons of flavors and jargons! From Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, Indilinx, SandForce, SLC, MLC, Enterprise Grade MLC, IOPS and so on… Confuse? Me too… DO YOUR HOMEWORK BEFORE BUY!
- Most benchmarks are synthetic, and done within hours, not days or months, so you can’t rely on benchmark!
- In the end, current SSD will ended up as coffee coaster within 2-3 years (depend on your workload).
- Controller has a very important role in SSD, so, firmware update can brings significant improvement or worse.
Operating System 101
- Your OS, modern one (Windows XP is not qualified!), does make changes to at least 5K files every time you use it from boot to shutdown (not boot then shutdown)
- Open 50 pages of websites everyday means at least 10K files has been changed by your OS
- Write, compile and modify codes everyday means at least 100K files will affected!
- Listening iTunes does adding more files to change.
- Downloading 1MB of file doesn’t means you only affect 1MB of your HDD, it’s more than you can imagine!
How To Perform REAL Benchmark on SSD ?
USE IT EVERYDAY AND YOU’LL KNOW WHEN YOUR PRECIOUS SSD WILL DEAD!
REAL WORLD Requirements
- Heavy I/O operations, I compile codes most of the time, not to mentions download and mail activities.
- Size DOES matter for me! I love to shoot raw with my DSLR and I love to keep the original and I shoots a lot. It’s useless to use 40GB SSD as boot drive! Your apps will launch faster, but not your data! Opening 500MB of Final Cut Studio project from secondary mechanical drive still be ages to wait!
- Journalize file system is IMPORTANT for me! I’m not gonna sacrifice my Time Machine and Spotlight feature just for the sake of faster drive! DO NOT sacrifice convenience over small portion of performance! Overall performance is the best!
- I use Mac, so, idle Garbage Collection feature is important since Mac doesn’t support TRIM and WON’T supporting it not even on Lion Beta! So, I’m not gonna wait for Apple implementing TRIM to migrate to SSD (it would be endless).
- With heavy workload (let say 20-30GB data changes everyday), you’ll definitely wants your precious SSD to live longer (2-3 years) as a FULL FEATURED HDD not a READ-ONLY HDD!
How To Choose The Right SSD ?
- Controller is important! Make sure you can easily update the firmware!
- Warranty is everything! Your drive can ended up as a coaster if the support is bad!
- FAST != RELIABLE! SandForce based SSD is FAST, however, from my friends experiences, Intel outperform SF-1200 after a month!
- DO NOT LOOK AT BENCHMARK RESULT! Fast is important, but useless if you can only enjoy it in less than 6 months!
- Wait for your friend tried SSD, even recommend different controller for each of your friends and see how long those drives ended up to become read-only mode! Cruel, but you certainly don’t want to spent $500 on a crappy SSD.
- Specs at the label can only be achieved under a very long list of impossible requirements in the real world usage. So, DON’T TRUST IT!
- You SHOULD NOT choose the wrong path by agreeing to perform low-level format for your SSD every 2 months and so. If you decided to go that direction, then something is wrong with your head! Computer is our slave, not us become a slave of our computer just for the sake of temporary speed performance!
Recommended SSD
Here are list of recommended SSD with its lifespan based on real world experiences. Note, all based on heavy workload that my friends did everyday with their SSD, it can vary for different situations, but you get the picture. I’m gonna say BRO for Before Read Only, where Before Read Only mode means you still can write to your SSD but slower than standard 7200rpm drive can do (means below 30MB/s). All happened in Indonesia, so, warranty maybe different for your country.
- OCZ Vertex 2 Pro 240GB, lifespan = 2-3 months BRO (OCZ refused to replace the drive with read-only mode)
- Corsair Force 240GB, lifespan = 4-6 months BRO (Corsair replaced the drive within 2-3 weeks of RMA)
- Crucial RealSSD 256GB, lifespan = 2 weeks BRO, 3 weeks RO (Crucial won’t replaced the drive with reason user failure, so it’s ended up as a glass coaster at my friend apartment)
- Intel X-25M G2 160GB, lifespan = >6 months, so far so good.
- Samsung 470 Series 256GB, lifespan = almost 2 months right now and everything is good (twice faster than Intel X-25M G2)
- Toshiba 500GB (bought from Apple Store, it’s actually 480GB), lifespan = almost a year and everything is okay, not fast, but it works (warranty only 1 year by default)
- Patriot Inferno 200GB, lifespan = >4 months, still works, but write speed down to 100MB/s in average, read speed still around 170MB/s
- OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 480GB, lifespan = almost 4 months now and it still on its first time condition (means perfect)
From that experience, I decided to removed my optical drive on my brand new MBP to go with double drive. I can’t afford $1000 for 500GB SSD, so I decided to buy 256GB Samsung 470 Series through my friend in New York (Samsung has officially inform me that the drive won’t be available outside US). I’m using OWC Data Doubler for my SSD bracket, and keeping my Seagate Momentus XT as reference-data-only storage. Momentus XT has low power compared to other 7200rpm notebook HDD, so in total with my SSD, it has the same power requirements with standard 7200rpm 7200.4 Seagate HDD. You can get the OWC Data Doubler here.
That’s all folks, decide for yourself which one is suit you the best! Once you’re in, you’ll never want to go back to old mechanical drive! Because it’s fast and everything you want for your laptop!
