Hey Guys,
Since the new iMac's came out with the Dual HD bays I have been more and more tempted to move my boot drive over to an SSD. I had upgraded it to a WD Caviar Black (WD1002FAEX) the new model with the 64MB Cache. This was a nice bump in performance for a sweet price. Newegg has them for like $90 and If you can't do the SSD option, I think the Black is 2nd best
So this weekend, I go the coin together and purchased an Intel X-25 SSD Drive. I just finished the install and if anyone wants I will post some pictures on using the bracket that comes with the Intel drive as it was a bit tricky.
Since I couldn't afford all the room I needed on an SSD and the prices are still way high, I decided to move to a dual drive setup, I now have the SSD running everything except my Home folder, that is on an External Firewire 800 1TB Drive (You guessed it a WD Black
I moved to this setup for a few weeks with 2 WD Blacks just to get a feel for it and I can tell you It works great! You can find many guides to moving your home folder online, I followed the TUAW guide.
This setup is SWEET! The boot in performance has been killer and benchmarks aside I wish I would have done this the first day I got this machine... Here are the Specs
iMac 24" Core2Duo 2.93GHz, 4GB DDR3 Ram, Intel X-25 SSD Boot Drive, Geforce GT120 Graphics.
Caviar Black 1TB "Spinner" Drive
Quickbench Test
XBench Test
Intel X-25 Solid State Drive
Quickbench Test
XBench Test
Not sure why write on the SSD is stuck in the 80MB range, I haven't done any "tuning" and I am not sure what is available in OS X.
If anyone has any questions or comments I would love to hear them!
Top
