Mac Pro :: Using SSD X25-M Or OCZ Vertex
Apr 8, 2009
Ok... I don't have a mac pro yet.
I am a heavy photoshop user and I want a really snappy machine !
My initial thinking to build it that way:
System disk X25-m 80g (possiblity the 160g to dual boot windows for gaming... but d.mn the 160g is expensive)
Having a set of Velociraptor in software RAID 0 with 2 partition, one scratch disk (~60G) and the rest as my storage for RAWs and photo edits.
Finally a fourth disk, like a standard 1gb 7.2k to use as time machine back up / additional storage.
Would anything be wrong with that setup ? (I have heard that it ain't really good to share the scratch disk with another partition ? But I feel that I need to store my large edited images (I have some 1gb file for panoramas...) so I want those to be opened fast...
But looking at the new OCZ vertex, that comes with higher space for a more moderate price (compared to the IBM), I may built the system some other way...
Could I use one of the "available" sata port in the optical bay to put the scratch ssd disk ? Leaving availble 2 sata slot for a software raid 0 of 2 300g velociraptor ?
How would compare the SSD vs RAID 0 velociraptor for the scratch disk ?
And I've read that the OCZ Vertex is slightly below the X25-M in read but trumps it on write ?? Any real life feedback in a Mac pro ? Any stuttering issues encountered with the Vertex ?
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Oct 26, 2010
I'm about to get the first SSDs for my MacPro, and the reviews and postings about the OWC look very good .
However, I'd like to use the SSDs in Raid0 arrays, and OWC recommends the RE models for this purpose, due to their 28% over-provisioning .
After doing a little research, I noticed that OCZ is offering the Vertex 2 in both 28% and 7% over-provisioning versions, the VTX and VTXE(xtended), and they are pretty much the same price - yet OWC is charging quite a bit more for the RE drives compared to the non-RE version.
While I'd rather buy from a trusted Mac vendor like OWC, I'm put off by the pricing policy; the additional warranty isn't of much concern to me, and the controller and other main components seem to be the same as in the Vertex 2 .
Is there anything in particular that makes the OWC RE drives more Mac friendly ?
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Jun 3, 2009
Do we have a few ppl using this SSD as boot volume?
If so, did the performance decrease noticeably after a few weeks
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Apr 16, 2010
After I purchased my 2.66GHz Core i7 yesterday, the first order of business was to open it up and remove the 500GB factory drive and replace it with my OCZ Vertex 128GB SSD drive. I was hoping I could simply drop in the Vertex (which had been in use in my previous MacBook) and boot away. But, as I suspected might happen, the OS X already on the Vertex didn't have the necessary support for the new model/CPU. I had to format the Vertex, install a fresh copy of OS X from the DVD supplied with the Core i7, and then use Migration Assistant to move over my data from a backup drive. No biggie.
Anyway, this baby SMOKES with that SSD drive in there! Check out these boot times:
From the moment I press the power button to a fully loaded Finder/Desktop: 19 seconds
From the moment I hear the startup bong to a fully loaded Finder/Desktop: 13 seconds
From the moment the spinning wheel first appears below the Apple logo (the beginning of drive access) to a fully loaded Finder/Desktop: 7 seconds
Shutdown time is awesome as well:
From the moment I confirm shutdown by clicking "OK" (pressing Enter) to a fully shut down computer: Less than 3 seconds!
The 19 second figure is roughly equivalent to what I was getting with my previous MacBook Pro. However, on that older model, the time between pressing the power button and hearing the startup bong was about 3 seconds. The new MacBook Pro takes 6 seconds for that part of the boot process. So, the boot process from the startup bong is actually 3 seconds faster with the Core i7 model.
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Sep 19, 2010
SSD bandwagon, and have a question. I bought a 2.5" Vertex 2 60GB, which seems to be doing very well in all the benchmarks. I know OSX has no TRIMM support yet, and there is a lot of rumbling about using the right firmware in order to increase the SSD's lifespan. I read I'll probably have to use Windows in order to update the firmware in OCZ SSD's. Can anyone tell me, how I can check the firmware version of the SSD using OSX ? Can it be done, or do you need Windows for this as well ?? I have no idea what firmware it runs, so there is no way to know if it needs updating.
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Nov 18, 2010
ust installed my OCZ vertex 2E 240GB drive
Installation was pretty easy to be honest and I'm a novice with laptops.
did a clean install had to partition drive first then install OSX after doing all that I did a migration from time machine.
Something odd it booted up and my facetime app wouldnt work, got the error message that OSX was to old a version for it to work..
found it had 10.6.3 on it, thought it was odd as I did an install from the disc and my system came with 10.6.4.
so I did all the updates from software update up to 10.6.5 and now everything seems perfectly fine and lightening fast
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Nov 24, 2010
Just curious. I want to know if my base MPB will be faster than a maxed out MBA with this SSD
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Nov 29, 2010
Which would you guys tell me to get in the 120 GB variant and why?
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Apr 6, 2009
I am waiting on delivery of a Vertex drive for my Macbook Pro. While waiting on delivery I have been following some posts on OCZ's support forums
Now I am curious. Does this product have major issues in the Macbook, or do the problems described in the OCZ forum represent a small percentage of Mac users? Let's see what the numbers are for users in this forum.
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Apr 14, 2009
I'm getting ready to pull the trigger on a pair of SSD's.
Looking at the OCZ forums, it seems like there are a still a number of outstanding issues... random lockups out of sleep, no trim support, (therefore worse write performance on a loaded drive), and on and on...[URL]
Yet there's very little noise around the Intel drives (besides the late bootcamp issue). Is that because I'm just not looking in the right place or there simply is no outstanding issues with Intel's X-25M now?
Does anyone here have any more insights?
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May 22, 2009
Curious as to everyone's thoughts on the New Vertex EX vs. the Intel X25-E
Access Time?
IOPS? - not sure what this is, but it sounds like people care about it.
Overall?
The new OCZ Vertex EX or the Intel X25-E
I may have to put one in a MBP?
Necessary - not at all, but still tempting
I've looked on google already and didn't find much, so please don't use that card Mikes70Mustang
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Jul 17, 2009
From what I have seen the Vertex 120 gb ( for less than 400 USD ) and the intel x-25 80 gb are my options.80 too small for my taste , I have read a lot about this drives, but is the difference between them that high ?Btw, are there other options that I should look at ?
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Jan 4, 2011
I am thinking of buy a 60GB OCZ Vertex 2 (E) SSD for my 13" MBP, when I was doing research, I found in OCZ's technology forum that people complaining its lifespan drops a percent for every 3-4 days, so I am worried that if this is true, then it can last only a little bit more than a year, although I can get replacement under 3-years warranty, the time spend for re-installing system and migrate all my files is another problem. Also, I do programming, VM and Photoshop, plus web surfing and music, so there is lots of "writes" involved, I'm afraid it won't last a year.
Furthermore, keep watching its health status while using it is a painful experience as you see it dying slowly, similar to checking Load_Cycle_Count of HDD which is the reason I want to switch to SSD.
Anyone using OCZ SSD or other brands, can you share your experience and advice?
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Mar 17, 2009
Just installed my Vertex 250 using the MaxUpgrades 3.5 to 2.5" sled that arrived today (works perfect): Here are the XBench results. 560% score increase over previous stock 320GB HDD. Massive increase overall. So far so good:
Disk Test51.02
Sequential120.11
Uncached Write125.7077.18 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write121.1968.57 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read97.9428.66 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read145.2472.99 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random32.39
Uncached Write10.881.15 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write76.3824.45 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read89.160.63 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read137.8825.58 MB/sec [256K blocks]
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Jan 15, 2010
Alright guys, so I got a 2.53 ghz 13' mbp. I'm wondering which one of these drives is faster? I've tried googling this info and can't find anything.
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Mar 28, 2010
I'm going to install either a 160GB Intel X25-M or 120GB OCZ Vertex in my 17'' 2.8Ghz MBP that I use for digital audio production and live performances. Any thoughts on which to choose?
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May 18, 2012
Just bought a new 15" 2.5 A/G and want to install a Vertex 3 SSD to replace the HDD. Despite reading & watching the "how to's", I'm not exactly clear if I simply insert the included restore disc after I do the upgrade or do I need a data transfer kit? I plan to migrate data from my old MBP w/SL(10.6.8), after the upgrade?
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Dec 13, 2010
It seems that going by the OCZ site the drive can only be reflashed with the latest firmware from a windows based machine. Is that correct?Haven't plugged it in yet but I hope mine comes with v1.24.
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Mar 8, 2009
Added latest scores for Firmware 1199. Check out the xbench scores Woo hoo ! Just got my Vertex 120GB yesterday. Inside is a plain black box. Looks like OCZ is learning from Apple. Kinda reminds me of the iPhone packaging. The drive itself: This replaces the current WD Scorpio Blue 320GB in my Macbook 2.0 GHz Installing the Vertex couldn't be easier, but one has to use the 4 Torx screws so that the drive fits into the bay And that's what it looks like ... fitting snugly inside. I think I like the sleek black Anyways, enough of pics. Onto install notes, benchmarks and impressions. I partitioned the drive in Apple's DiskUtility. And installed OS X 10.5.5 and then updated with the 10.5.6 combo update. I then installed Office 2008 and VMWare Fusion. If you are concerned with alignment, don't be ... at least under OS X. That is because Apple's utilities do alignment on 4K (4096) byte boundaries. It's not perfect but it is better than nothing. If you figure out how to do the alignment yourself and still keep the GUID partition table with the protective MBR and 200MB EFI partition - please post it so that we can experiment with it. In the meantime let's look at the partition table. Running " sudo fdisk /dev/rdisk0 " in Terminal gives us the following output:...............
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Jun 23, 2009
I was planning on getting the Intel X25M SSD but then thought the OCZ Vertex 128GB would be more practical. However, reading some posts here and a lot over at the OCZ forum it looks like the Vertex is problematic in the 2009 MPBs in regard to install and sleeping.
So I'm wondering if these issues are pervasive or if the people w/ these problems are random, maybe having to do w/ something specific to their machine.
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Aug 2, 2009
Do i need to buy the mac edition for use in my mini or will the standard vertex drive be compatible?
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Aug 3, 2009
I'm planning to order + install a OCZ Vertex TURBO (128 Gb) in my new MBP. Unfortunately, as these SSDs are still fairly new, I could not find any information from people who have experience working with them, let alone working with them on a MBP.
Does anyone have one of these, and have you encountered any problems? Or would you not recommend buying one of them, and go for the OCZ Vertex instead (which seems to have a larger user-base).
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Nov 25, 2010
Vertex as main drive, so for OS and backup?Will using it this way slow it down significantly?I want to keep my late 2008 2.66/8Gb 15" Unibody, until Sandybridge models are released
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Jan 5, 2011
Today I fitted a 120GB OCZ Vertex 2, it has made a huge difference to the responsiveness, especially to Lightroom and CS5. I used Xbench to test the change from the standard 7200rpm 500GB HDD to the SSD. I'm interested if they are where.
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Apr 5, 2009
I ran a few standard QuickBench tests on my week old SSD. It is quite a bit faster than the G. Skill Titan drive I was considering (the end of this post has results of the G. Skill on the same tests). The numbers are nice to look at, but it just feels extremely fast. Also note that the drive linked above seems to only have the OS loaded. My drive has about 100 GB of data (everything from my old computer) in addition to the OS X installation. Here's a video of the drive loading 35 apps at once It'd be great if someone with an intel x-25m could post QuickBench results. The computer is a 2.4 GHz unibody MacBook with 4 GB of ram.
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Aug 11, 2009
pretty sweet firmware update for indilinx firmware drives, more notably the vertex. garbage collection feature to speed up drives when they are idle to improve drive performance.
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Mar 30, 2010
I've been surfing the web for hours now to find the right SSD for me. I have an ExpressCard SSD which unfortunately is having too many problems so I am planning on buying the MCE OptiBay to replace the SuperDrive with a second hard drive.
So my intention is to buy a cheap/small SSD to install OS X on it and to keep the home folder on the internal drive. There seem to be two SSDs which fit into that category. I need some advice whether those two products even work on my MacBook Pro Early 2008 2,4GHz, or if there are any other incompatibilities & problems.So the two candidates are Intel X25-V 40GB or OCZ Vertex 30GB.
The OCZ offers less space and costs slightly more but neither of them are really significant as they are in my price range. The OCZ ("Read: Up to 230 MB/s & Write: Up to 135 MB/s") seems to be much faster then the Intel one ("Read: up to 170MB/s & Write: up to 35MB/s"). Especially the writing speed of the Intel X25-V is really poor, even when compared to normal HDDs.
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Aug 1, 2010
Which drive is better for OSX considering the lack of trim support?
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Jun 30, 2010
Can anyone suggest which SSD to choose :-
OCZ Vertex 2 50GB vs Corsair Performance 64GB ?
Right now I can get both for the same price.
I know the Corsair has the 128MB cache but could not dig up the cache for the OCZ.
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Sep 29, 2010
I need a drive that makes zero noise. Doesn't need to be the best of the best at speeds.
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