![]() ![]() All the usual speed you’ve heard about SSDs was true for me too–faster OS boot, faster login, faster app launches. The “real world” results in terms of how the computer feels is fantastic. (If you’re wondering why these results are lower than some SSD numbers you might have seen, bear in mind the 2008 Mac Pro has a slower SATA interface than the modern stuff.) However, the SSD is faster–in fact, twice as fast for small random reads! This is rather remarkable–the SSD runs about $400 and the RAID setup is about $2,000 (though with 32x the physical capacity). So the SSD performs slower than the RAID for everything sequential, which is not surprising. So what are the results? The raw benchmarks show that the SSD is about 2x faster for small, random 4K reads, a little faster for small, random 4K writes, and much slower for everything else: (Note: This has nothing to do with the SSD, but rather that I was using 64-bit prior because I have 32 GB of RAM.) I forgot to change my boot arguments to boot 64-bit after reinstalling Snow Leopard, which caused some confusions for Adobe applications, Drobo, and others until I remembered to change that. I wonder what else has the home directory hard-coded.Ģ. But my home directory is now /Volumes/sas-raid/Users/mitch. DropBox seems to have hard-coded /Users//Dropbox for its path. Everything was good but a few things didn’t work as expected:ġ. Using the ‘Advanced Options’ by right-clicking my account in the System Prefs > Accounts panel, I pointed my user account at my old home folder on the SAS RAID. I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard onto the SSD, updated it, and migrated over my applications. So with mild expectations, I bought an SSD from OWC (and a NewerTech 3.5″/2.5″ bracket from Amazon, shown in the picture above) and configured it as the boot/applications drive. I’ve been hoping to keep it limping along until the next revision. My Mac Pro is almost 4 years old and really starting to show its age. I’ve been using MacBook Airs with SSDs for a few years now, but since I had a fast SAS RAID array on my Mac Pro, I had been pretty content to live without one in the Mac Pro. This week I finally got around to biting the bullet and buying a 250 GB SSD for my Mac Pro. ![]()
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