SSD on FW800

[bayswater]

I was considering the advantages of replacing the hard drive in an external FW800 enclosure with an SSD. I'm not expecting any improvement in read write speeds. The main reason would be to avoid the delays from spin up time on this drive. In theory, I can prevent the drive from sleeping but that doesn't work reliably. And recent OS X versions seem to insist on having all drives spinning for any read and write operation, so I'm waiting a lot for drives to get up to speed.

Cost is not an issue; a small SSD drive will what I want, so maybe $125 will do it. If it doesn't work, I can put it in a laptop.

But the surprise came from reading reports from people that have tried it on iMacs where replacing the main drive is difficult or impossible. The main result is what you'd expect on FW800-- sustained reads run at around 55M. The more interesting result; for disk operations that involve large numbers of short random access reads, the FW800 with an SSD is about 5 times faster than the internal SATA-3 internal drive. An example is starting up the Mac and loading an image into photoshop.

Any opinions or experience with this?

[amergin]

I recently installed a 1tb ssd (crucial.com) in my 2010 iMac 27" and quite honestly my life has changed! From a startup time of 3-4 minutes (I'd startup and go and boil the kettle) to a startup of 5-7 seconds! All of my apps startup up more or less immediatley and IT'S QUIET!!!! I was able to leave my 1tb internal drive in and I have installed Mountain App which allows me to sleep the internal drive until I need it (which is infrequently). I know you're talking about putting it into an external enclosure and that was my idea for ages but I just went round and round in circles until I read on the crucial site that I could install it alongside the internal (I still have the DVD drive in there as well). Whatever you do I wish you well and hope you get as much satisfaction as I have out of it.

[mikehalloran]

What year is your 27" iMac?

[bayswater]

It's the one you can't do the upgrade you did on yours.

[mikehalloran]

It's the one you can't do the upgrade you did on yours.

There are three years that fit that definition, 2009, 2012 and 2013 (the current). Since TB is better than eSATA here, I'll assume a 2009 in your case.

Yes, the eSATA mod was the smart thing to do on the 2010 but no reason to do it on the 2011 since it also has Thunderbolt.

You could get an ethernet enclosure. That should give you a minor speed boost over FW800. I notice that ethernet drives don't lag the system when they wake up like FW drives can. Other than that, you're right that the only real advantage of an SSD is that you save on the start up time. The theoretical limits of 800 and 1G apply to both types.

Since there's nothing to be gained by putting an SSD to sleep, set it so that it never does. This will help over FW. Various versions of the OS are not always cooperative with that. I don't recall how 10.6.8 is in that regards.

The other advantage is that SSDs don't need fans if they're in the right enclosure. The Voyager Q and similar docks handle FW (and USB 3 if you later update to something that supports it). It's not the only game in town, of course. I've been using docks since 2009 and have never had a failure of one or a drive that I mounted in one. I like having no fan noise.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/NewerTec ... Drive_Dock

[bayswater]

Thanks Mike. I never considered and ethernet enclosure. That sounds like the ideal solution for my setup. It would give me 4 drives on separate busses, or let me keep drives and audio interfaces separate.