SSD question....

Brian8bit

Brian8bit

Brian8bit

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After upgrading the RAM in my iMac and MBP a week or so ago, I'm planning on an SSD upgrade for both. The iMac is late 2009, the MBP is mid 2010. Both of these will be SATA 3Gb/s machines. Is there any point in putting a SATA 6Gb/s drive in either machine?

What I'm wondering is if we're at a point were SATA 3 drives can saturate the SATA 2 bus? If so, there's not really much point putting a drive in that is going to be bottle necked by the SATA 2 bus...

Also, can anyone recommend a couple of drives. All my important documents, files and work is stored on external HDD backups, so the only thing that really needs to go on the SSD is OS and applications.
 
I have a C300 256gb (the one before the M4) on my 09 mbp, which originally was to have the sata 1 bus on it (the did a firmware fix silently at one point to make it 2 though). Basically you won't notice the bottle neck as the hard drive is just so much more responsive/better than a mechanical one :)

Having the sata 3 drive just means you can yank it out when you upgrade next and have a faster drive.

For me my Crucial drive has been a dream to use, no problems and lots of awesome performance, so id recommend without hesitation the upgrade to mine the M4 in what ever size you can lay your hands on. It seems for better write speeds you need a bigger drive so the 128gig looks a good price to start (256 is a fair bit more but is amazing). Just depends how much space you need. :)
 
Cheers for the reply. Good point about future upgrading. Space isn't a biggy, as said, most of my important bits are stored externally. So it's only really OS and applications I need on the internal drive.

I was looking at the Crucial RealSSD 64GB and the OCZ Agility 3 60GB as they're a good price and I could grab a pair for under £200. The write speed on the Crucial drive (around 110MB/sec) seems very low though compared to the OCZ drive (Maximum Write: 475MB/sec). Would the OCZ drive be the better option?

Crucial Drive.

OCZ Drive.
 
As a sort of "apparently so" word and mouth sort of recommendation there have been problems with SSD's using the SandForce controller this time round (which is the OCZ drive). To the hard drive sub section to look for a little evidence for that thought either way.

My first hand experience is just with the big Crucial drive so I'm not the best person to make a one way or another sort of decision, but for a thought chances are you'll only install everything once on the hard drive anyway so higher write speeds won't matter too much (even if they are on the 110mb drive still roughly 3/4 times faster than a mechanical hard drive).

I personally have a bit of brand loyalty to Crucial as the drive the sold me last year has been exemplary and would expect the same level of awesomeness from the M4 series what ever the size.
 
I have an OCZ Vertex 3 240GB in my main PC and it's sickeningly fast. Will max out at 550MB read/write.
 
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