Apple SSD Upgrades - The Only Drives To Buy In Mid 2009
08/06/09 21:06 Filed in: Best Mac SSD
This chart - Lifted from BenchmarkReviews.com - pretty much says it all: As of Mid 2009 the truly decent SATA interface SSD's worth buying -- and that give the best bang for the buck can be simplified down to a handful:
The best value lies in these few drives: An OCZ Agility
, A Super Talent UltraDrive ME or GX
, The Patriot Torqx or Warp V3 Series
, and an OCZ Vertex Family
-- or perhaps a RAID 0 Apex
. The rest of the chart was cropped out - It just wasn't worth bothering with - although Intel's X-25M and E drives probably should have been in the original list. Intel's drives are consistent top performers in nearly and SSD benchmark.
Other OCZ Vertex drive variants and Firmware Revs shown below matter only to the incremental Tweaky-Geeks who live by a stop-watch or have bleeding-edge wallets. The designs, controller chips, the flash memory chips used - are all leveling out to a basic commodity used in most of the drives these days. Any of the handful of SSD's above will deliver GREAT performance far, far exceeding your Macs original SATA hard drive.
The best value lies in these few drives: An OCZ Agility
, A Super Talent UltraDrive ME or GX, The Patriot Torqx or Warp V3 Series, and an OCZ Vertex Family -- or perhaps a RAID 0 Apex. The rest of the chart was cropped out - It just wasn't worth bothering with - although Intel's X-25M and E drives probably should have been in the original list. Intel's drives are consistent top performers in nearly and SSD benchmark.Other OCZ Vertex drive variants and Firmware Revs shown below matter only to the incremental Tweaky-Geeks who live by a stop-watch or have bleeding-edge wallets. The designs, controller chips, the flash memory chips used - are all leveling out to a basic commodity used in most of the drives these days. Any of the handful of SSD's above will deliver GREAT performance far, far exceeding your Macs original SATA hard drive.
Benchmarks of OCZ Vertex on Mac OSX
04/13/09 01:59 Filed in: SSD benchmarks | OCZ SSD
For SSD benchmark freaks: Here's an absolutely great post at the OCZ Technology Forums: Macintosh based SSD tests run on a Vertex Series SSD in a Unibody MacBook.
Benchmarked are Apple's Mac OS X Version 10.5.6 Leopard
as well as Windows 7 running via Apple's BootCamp - and also compares the OCX Vertex Series SSD laptop drives
to an excellent alternative to an SSD, one of the fastest conventional platter SATA drives: the WD Scorpio Series Hard Drive 2.5" spinning disk drives.
Impressive SSD read-write numbers, app launch timings, and SSD speed improvements are detailed. If you weren't sure if you were ready for a solid-state drive on your Macintosh - this should convince you. Here's a tidbit on launch times of Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 - which has become quite big and bloated:
Benchmarked are Apple's Mac OS X Version 10.5.6 Leopard
as well as Windows 7 running via Apple's BootCamp - and also compares the OCX Vertex Series SSD laptop drives to an excellent alternative to an SSD, one of the fastest conventional platter SATA drives: the WD Scorpio Series Hard Drive 2.5" spinning disk drives.Impressive SSD read-write numbers, app launch timings, and SSD speed improvements are detailed. If you weren't sure if you were ready for a solid-state drive on your Macintosh - this should convince you. Here's a tidbit on launch times of Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 - which has become quite big and bloated:
| 1st run (WD Scorpio HDD) | 1st run (OCZ Vertex SSD) | |
| Entourage | 18.6 sec | 5 sec |
| Mac Excel | 5.1 sec | 2.2 sec |
| MS Word | 8.5 sec | 2.1 sec |
| Powerpoint | 4.9 sec | 3.5 sec |
