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SSD in MacPro
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Junior Member
Join Date: Oct 2008
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So I recently bought a Macbook Pro w. a SSD - and needless to say I am in love with the speed. Naturally it has me looking to upgrade my MacPro with the exact same. But my question is if I would gain any advantage to having ALL drives in the box SSD's versus a typical SATA drive. What I've done now is use one drive for the OS and apps, and a dedicated drive for documents and files.
I have no problem springing for a SSD for the main drive, but is it overkill for the documents one too? Is there any advantage (say for example, read/write access?)
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Moderator Emeritus
Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: Arizona
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I honestly wouldn't bother with an SSD for something as rarely used as a backup/documents drive. There will definitely be improvements in the read/write speed, of course. But whether or not you would actually notice them given the drive's purpose is another matter. I doubt it.
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I like chicken
I like liver
Meow Mix, Meow Mix
Please de-liv-er
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Junior Member
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Maynard,
Let me explain better... I am a designer. So I have all of my apps on the main HD, which would be the SSD. I guess another way of asking: When working with large files, (say for example, a large print file)... If Photoshop or Illustrator is running off the SSD but reading/writing from a SATA drive... does one defeat the other?
Is it a case where the application can only go as fast as the slowest component in the system?
To be clearer: The drive is not for backups, it's where I store all of my design files. The idea was to separate 1TB of data completely away from the OS drive in the event of drive failure, etc. I have other drives for backups, external and otherwise. Right now of course, in my current MacPro this is done with multiple SATA drives. So if I had 1 ssd but still used a traditional SATA for the files I design, am I really just negating the advantages of the SSD in the first place?
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Administrator
Join Date: Jun 2000
Location: California
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Who is 'Maynard'?
1 TB SSDs are not cheap at 40 or more times the price of a regular 1 TB HD. An SSD for system & apps will accelerate bootup & application launching. Apps that use cache space on the boot drive will gain some speed there too.
Using an SSD for a data drive will cause files to open/save faster. But that's a heck of a lot to pay for such a speedup. You'd have to be opening/saving big files all day, with your time worth serious money. That, or tell us cost is no object and we'll stop objecting.
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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You're always better off with more on the SSD, but even just having your OS/apps/current project on the SSD with old projects/backups on spinning disks will give you a significant bump.
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Junior Member
Join Date: Oct 2008
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Good to know, I guess my concern/question was whether using a regular SATA for storing the documents I work on would essentially negate the speed of the SSD for the primary Macintosh HD. Thanks for all of the input.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Maryland
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Short answer is no, it won't.
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Houston, TX
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Working with those documents will be no faster. You need to have your working set on the SSD. Keep the spinny disk for storage.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: here
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Prices on SSDs are dropping.
The current price for an SSD as a main drive is $1250 (down from $1450 initially).
SSDs as second and third etc. drive still cost $1400 - for whatever reason.
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Posting Junkie
Join Date: Dec 2000
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$1250? What is that for, a 512 GB drive or something? 256 GB SSDs typically run from $550 to $700 these days. A 128 GB would be even less if you could deal with that small a boot disk. If you've got a Mac Pro, you don't need a huge SSD boot drive, since you can just install a big HDD to store your data (which won't benefit as much from the SSD as your apps and system will).
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Moderator
Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Originally Posted by CharlesS
$1250? What is that for, a 512 GB drive or something?
Yes.
Originally Posted by CharlesS
256 GB SSDs typically run from $550 to $700 these days. A 128 GB would be even less if you could deal with that small a boot disk. If you've got a Mac Pro, you don't need a huge SSD boot drive, since you can just install a big HDD to store your data (which won't benefit as much from the SSD as your apps and system will).
I agree. A 128 gig drive should be enough - just having the OS with all its libs on the SSD will be a huge boost. I wouldn't go lower, though - smaller drives tend to have lower bandwidth, which can hurt in some situations.
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The new Mac Pro has up to 30 MB of cache inside the processor itself. That's more than the HD in my first Mac. Somehow I'm still running out of space.
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: here
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Originally Posted by P
A 128 gig drive should be enough - just having the OS with all its libs on the SSD will be a huge boost. I wouldn't go lower, though - smaller drives tend to have lower bandwidth, which can hurt in some situations.
Apple doesn't offer smaller drives.
If installing it is easy, one could buy a smaller drive and install it.
But I would want a drive large enough to store all projects on it I'm currently working on and my core image library.
But if the prices keep dropping...
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