A couple tricks and fastest options for SSDs out now.

[mikehalloran]

OWC's self serving sales pitch is what I see in the linked article. All Apple branded (internal) SSDs support Trim, and OSX automatically enables Trim for these drives. Representatives of LSI, the manufacturer of the SandForce controller, have always recommended using Trim.

Trim is Good.

Seagate now owns the SandForce intellectual property. As noted by Seagate rep Kent Smith in his comments at the end of the article:

"TRIM will provide extra free space for Garbage Collection depending upon the unused space of the end user. If an SSD is only filled to 80% capacity, then the extra 20% of remaining space is free to become "dynamic over provisioning." That means the SSD can be much faster with TRIM enabled and if the user does not fill the SSD to full capacity."

But without Trim enabled, the user, like the SSD itself, has no idea how many cells are actually free to be erased and written to. Not filling SSDs to capacity is definitely a good practice. So is enabling Trim, because it allows the SSD to not be filled to capacity.

The Trim issues created by Apple with Yosemite are one of the reasons I have not migrated my studio Mac to this version of OSX. There are other reasons, not the least being I prefer to not be an early adaptor/beta tester. The biggest reason is DP8.07 and Mountain Lion have proven to be a virtually flawless combination, and that makes me and my clients very happy.

By the way, "hacking the kernel" is simply turning off a "feature" that OSX never had before Yosemite. That said, there are definitely pros and cons to enabling Trim under Yosemite. I have furnished a link to Cindori's excellent explanation in a prior post, and encourage anyone interested in this subject to review the information there.

I am hopeful Apple will ultimately allow Trim to be enabled for third party SSDs under Yosemite, as Apple manufactures no Thunderbolt SSD and, as a result, there is no external SSD storage available (other than Apple-branded PCIe storage that can on occasion be found on Ebay) that will natively support Trim under Yosemite.

The reasons to enable TRIM in Yosemite: all the above.

The only reason not to: you may accidentally reset the NVRAM (PRAM) which will cause a problem. If you do this, you must either use the Terminal commands per Cindori.com or Option-Boot into the recovery partition and reinstall the OS (simpler but takes longer).

[Michael Canavan]

The eSATA ports are 6G, not 3G like the internal drive bays.

OK cool just found out that sSATA 3 is a thing, so yeah if it's eSATA 3 then it operates at 600mbs, the fastest SATA goes at the moment.

[Michael Canavan]

OWC's PCIe blade is the fastest SSD for the MP. The eSATA ports are 6G, not 3G like the internal drive bays.

I would beg to differ, at 1100MB/s the Samsung Xp941 has a massive amount of slowing down to do because of TRIM support issues before it hits 820MB/s, 280MB/s worth actually. I'm your guinea pig on this test.

[mhschmieder]

After reading all of my printouts on the train ride home tonight, I felt armed with enough knowledge to tackle this issue in earnest.

So, I was quite surprised when I revisited OWC and found that they ONLY offer the RAID solution (though of course you don't have to use the E2 that way). Anyway, that explains why it's so pricey; I hadn't noticed before that this was their only offering.

They do, however, have a PCIe adapter for mSATA SSD drives:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/PCIEACCELM/

The recommended mSATA SSD is the slightly older Samsung model (840 EVO mSATA SSD) vs. the newer 850 model (may not yet be available in mSATA format).

The eSATA RAID solution is considerably faster, but both have the same 3 year warranty:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe ... lsior/RAID

If you go a la carte with the PCIe adapter (the one with two eSATA ports), it's actually pricier, unless moving away from OWC as the SSD vendor:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDPHW2ES2UP/

Given the reliability advantages of SandForce and that the other vendors that use it are rather strongly Windows-based/biased, it's really looking like Digilloyd's suggestion from Mac Performance Guide is the ONLY fully vetted solution that ideally meets all of the most important criteria.

I'll keep digging to see if there's a way around this dilemma, as I don't need half a terabyte unless I partition and start using this PCIe SSD also for something that isn't likely to grow too quickly, but I can't offhand think of what that would be.

Preferably I would get a 240 GB SSD, but those aren't much cheaper than the 500 GB version (I'm roughing out the sizes to save time cross-referencing continuously).

As these prices have been stable for quite some time, maybe waiting until FEB will finally see some real drops for the first time in awhile.

[HCMarkus]

Given the reliability advantages of SandForce and that the other vendors that use it are rather strongly Windows-based/biased, it's really looking like Digilloyd's suggestion from Mac Performance Guide is the ONLY fully vetted solution that ideally meets all of the most important criteria.

Not everyone is enamored with SandForce drives, but if going SandForce, I'd go Intel. I have a bunch of 330s and 520s, and have been running them for several years now. All perfect to date, on either SATA2 (internal) or SATA3 (PCIe card) bus. Intel did a very thorough review / validation of its custom firmware before releasing its SandForce-based drives.

Also, note that there is nothing "Mac Centric" about OWC SSDs except their marketing.

The best SandForce deal around the holidays was the Intel 520; I got two 240GB for $109 each. Price has gone up, and now the 530s are cheaper. 530 and 520 are the same except for 530 uses 20nm NAND and the older 520 uses more robust 25nm NAND.

On Amazon, you can get Intel 530 480GB, a SAT3 drive with 5 year warranty, for a few dollars less than the OWC SATA2 drives with 3 year warranty. You'd pay $100 more for the OWC SATA3 SSD.

Regardless of all of the above, Anandtech has some different recommendations:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8783/best ... liday-2014
They also review PCIe SSDs and mSATA SSDs in the article.

This is a very cool mSATA PCIe card:
http://www.addonics.com/products/ad4mspx2.php
Up to 4 gigs on one PCIe slot! Since the controller is a 2x PCIe interface, the card will theoretically bottleneck when reading/writing to more than two mSAT cards at a time. But still, a sweet solution for those in need of speed and capacity at a modest price.

PS: I still like the accordion.

[jb]

great info all around.
Having just received spanking new SSD's, I was searching the forum about specific tips on formatting them and I could not find much,
My SSD's will be mainly for streaming sound libraries, does any of the MAC OS Extended formats suits them better?
I'm running MAC OS 10.9.4
thanks.

[mhschmieder]

HC, thanks for the AnandTech link, as they had fallen off my radar even though I've used them in the past. I'll read up on that more over the weekend; hard slog at work this week dealing with retina crashes.

Glad you're enjoying the accordion. It's a nice intermediate model, and they really start getting unwieldy once you go to the next size up!

[mhschmieder]

After reading all the AnandTech links, I keep coming back to OWC as my choice. It's actually cheaper, in terms of PCIe options, if going with an eSATA-expanded PCIe base. And even if going with a fairly generic PCIe connection, the price difference isn't huge vs. the Samsung.

It's a long wait (six months) until rev 3 of the SandForce technology, which might change the equation significantly.

My current plan is to upgrade as soon as I finally finish this album project that keeps dragging out (mostly because we are aiming for the toppermost of the poppermost rather than settling for "good enough" when it comes to the production). Our current target is mid February, and that's probably around the time of year that prices start dropping based on announcements.

The one thing I'm not sure about is whether it makes sense to get a slightly larger SSD and partition, using the rest for highly active audio projects, which would be treated separately from the full archive of all audio projects and would gain from super-fast performance and probably higher plug-in count before rendering stems.

My guess would be that it is OK to do this as there are no moving parts; whereas it is generally a bad idea (even with partitioning) to use the same physical drive for the system and for data.

I think this was discussed in a separate topic not too long ago, but unfortunately "sad" is one of those terms that the search engine rejects, so I'd have to sift through pages of posts to re-find it. I seem to recall someone talking about best use of SSD's for project data and/or sample libraries, outside of this general SSD topic.

[mhschmieder]

OK, I just reviewed this topic from start to finish, in the most detail ever, and am pretty firm in my decision. I just don't understand from the product pages whether the dual-blade PCIe solutions are presented as one drive or two drives, but like I said earlier (though tonight I can't find confirmation) I think OWC sets theirs up as RAID0-striped, so it would be a "fusion" drive?

Other than deciding whether to go for 480 GB and partition (unless each blade is its own drive) to use half for active audio projects vs. 240 GB for strictly system drive upgrade, I have the option to just buy the Samsung standalone with no adaptor and swap it into the optical drive (after making a boot drive clone first using my eSATA port to an external drive OR an internal drive that I swap out during the transition), reserving the PCIe later for purely data use on audio projects (since system drive stuff doesn't benefit as much from the PCIe boost due to quick and small read/write operations).

[EMRR]

I've got one installed, and it appears as a single RAID-0 drive. I'll be attempting a fusion meld with a HD sometime soon.

[mikehalloran]

great info all around.
Having just received spanking new SSD's, I was searching the forum about specific tips on formatting them and I could not find much,
My SSD's will be mainly for streaming sound libraries, does any of the MAC OS Extended formats suits them better?
I'm running MAC OS 10.9.4
thanks.

That's about the least strain you can put on a drive. No reason not to use Extended Journaled.

I strongly recommend updating to OS 10.9.5. There's a bug in 10.9.4 that can mess with Time Machine. (want to guess how I know?). I will spare you the details but the fix is 10.9.5 or Yosemite.

[mhschmieder]

EMRR thanks for the info. Even though not strictly necessary, I made peace with the idea of going RAID-0 as the minimally extra performance and stability is probably worth the slight sacrifice in available space.

I'm starting to lean more towards using Samsung to replace my 120 GB SSD in the optical slot as the system drive, and using the PCIe option for my main data drive for audio projects.