Which SSD?

rpadula

rpadula

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Rather than derail Adam's Macbook upgrade thread, I'll start another here.

Which SSD's are you using in your Macs? I haven't made the leap yet, but am considering it. Leaning towards an Intel or Samsung 830.
 
fwiw - I only have one mac with an SSD. For home use I bought a macbook pro in early 2011 with the 128GB SSD option.
 
Rich, you can read the consumer reviews on NewEgg or TigerDirect. Some filtering is required (just like on an internet forum :)), but there's good information. If it does well on a PC, it'll do well on a Mac unless there's some odd driver issue - and you'd likely hear about that - so read those reviews as well.
 
It's not a mac, but I've been running a OCZ Vertex PRO 120gb in my Fedora 17 Linux laptop. It supports SATA3, it's got a good chip set, nice and quick, so that would probably be my SSD recommendation.

Well worth the money (and it's not that much more), more durability and speed. I ordered my computer from tiger and the drive at the same time, right when I got it I installed it, been happy with it since.

Good place for hardware reviews

http://www.tomshardware.com/
 
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What's the biggest SSD available and where are the breaks in size and cost? What would a TB cost/require in space and weight?
 
Henning said:
What's the biggest SSD available and where are the breaks in size and cost? What would a TB cost/require in space and weight?
Click to expand...

OCZ has a 1TB SSD for $2200 at NewEgg (list is $2600). 2.5", 83g.

A 512Gb will run $300-$900.
 
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I got an Intel for my 2009 mbp because it had the lowest advertised power consumption. No regrets.
 
I have had an OCZ SSD running in my flight simulation desktop for years. It makes a difference. On the other hand, I have had two failures of OCZ and Kingston SSDs running in my HP laptop. And when those drives died, they died HARD. Couldn't see any data with low-level tools.

From a security standpoint, there's no way to degauss a damaged SSD - the storage at heart is NOT magnetic. Physical "smash it to small pieces" or "melt it down" is the only safe thing.

I love what SSDs do for performance and power consumption and shock resistance. But I strongly recommend you have a good backup strategy to separate storage media in place.
 
FWIW we have quite a few OCZ SSDs of vrious generations in use at my company and we've never had one fail.
 
Jesse,

I have heard good things... and my experiences may have more to do with my laptop than the drives themselves. The drives in my desktop have worked fine.

I just wanted people to know that the differences in the storage technology mean that the "tried and true" methods of data recovery and data destruction don't work in most cases, so it's important to realize that the SSDs are different. Better, but different.
 
Yes, there is no such thing as data recovery on an SSD. At least none that is accomplishable by the masses. But as somebody that has seen the failure side of the hard drive equation more times than I would count, I'd argue that a good backup strategy is a requirement regardless of the technologies being used. :D
 
Mines not a true SSD, so... None. ;)

You already read my comment from the airplane co-owner about too many warranty returns in his small PC shop on OCZ, but even he'll admit that could just be a bad batch or whatever.

OCZ would be out of biz in this low-margin PC parts world if they really didn't work most of the time, so it doesn't really matter.

If you're going for outrageous speeds, there's detailed tech articles on the different generations of chipsets. Intel used to lead the way, but that seems to be changing. And you'll pay outrageous money for those top of the line ones, at percentage gains measured in single digits in most cases.

The other place they all compete is in warranty length.

Only other thing to watch out for in Macs and most laptops is drive height, physically. Some 2.5 drives are too thick. Not much of a problem anymore, but once was a reason for cheap proces on some until they cleared the inventory and made shorter ones. ;)
 
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