Samsung 860 or OWC Mercury Extreme 6G

[VitcoMusic]

I'm about to replace one or two internal spinners on my 2011 Mac Pro 5:1 (8 Core). I've narrowed it down to:

Samsung 860 (500gb) - $118
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-500GB-In ... PDKIKX0DER

Or....

OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G (480gb) - $200
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-500GB-In ... PDKIKX0DER

The OWC seems to have features which make it more robust. Is it worth the higher price? Both have 5 year warranties.

Thanks all,

DV

[mikehalloran]

Samsung 860 EVO. Period. If you’re going to spend 2 bills, go larger. 1T is $217.
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Inch-Int ... 60+evo+1tb


There is nothing that justifies the higher price of the OWC. Notice that they don’t compare it to any of the current 3D NAND drives on the market. Way too expensive for old tech. Talk is cheap.

You have an SATA II bus. All that talk about the fastest etc. doesn’t apply.

There are other 3D NAND SSDs nowadays. Crucial MX500, WD Blue 3D or SanDisk Ultra 3D (same drive). All have 5yr warranties from major players and are better than the Mercury.

The Crucial MX500 is $177 for 1T.
https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX500-NA ... +1tb+mx500

[VitcoMusic]

Thanks Mike. That answers my question.

DV

[mikehalloran]

Once you’ve installed an SSD as your boot drive, enable TRIM by running sudo trimforce enable in Terminal, OS 10.10.4 and later. If earlier, get Trim Enabler from Cindori.
https://cindori.org

TRIM is part of the OS since 10.7, Windows and LINUX for good reasons. Apple disables it for 3rd party SSDs till you unblock it.

[HCMarkus]

Here are Anandtech's latest SSD recommendations:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9799/best-ssds

Note Crucial (1TB @ $177 on Amazon now) is the recommended SSD... great warranty and considerably less expensive than the Samsung (of which I have several). Looking at the price difference and negligible performance difference, I'd pick Crucial at this point.

[mikehalloran]

Yes, that's a good article but is PC-centric. All that means, in this case, that it ignores a couple things about the Mac.

The biggest is that you really want your OS, Apps and current work files on the boot drive. Not only does that make things faster (especially on a 5.1 MP with an SATA II bus) but there are huge advantages once you are running High Sierra formatted APFS.

Having your VIs on a separate drive is still good as is offloading archived work product. Otherwise, get the biggest boot SSD the budget can afford.

The idea that it's better to have your files on a bunch of drives died with the G5 and SATA.

The AnandTech report shows the 2T Micron 1100 for under $300 and doesn't really talk about it. The 1100 is an OEM drive and has no warranty from Micron—the VAR or OE packager is expected to back those up—or not—and that's reflected in the price. So, if it comes in a new Dell or HP, that's where the warranty is.

The 1100 is the exact same drive as the Crucial MX300 with its 3 year warranty and a steeper price but, for a few $ more, you can get the MX500 and its 5 year warranty and advanced 3D NAND. I recommend the 1100 only for VIs and not the boot SSD—if you get 3 years out of it, you saved some money. I have mine backed up but, worst case, can download all my VIs so what I install them on is not critical.

[HCMarkus]

The biggest is that you really want your OS, Apps and current work files on the boot drive. Not only does that make things faster (especially on a 5.1 MP with an SATA II bus) but there are huge advantages once you are running High Sierra formatted APFS.

MIke, could you detail why having work files on a separate drive is a disadvantage? Since, no matter where they reside, work files must be transmitted via a SATA bus, why would it be faster to load them and work with them from the OS drive?

It would strike me that, particularly when SSDs are SATA2 connected in a Mac Pro Cheesegrater, it could be advantageous to allow them to address the CPU independently, to more fully utilize the SATA bridge, which tops out at 800MB/s, as discussed here:

All the internal SATA connections on the Mac Pro 4,1 and 5,1 are 3Gbps each. The two optical bay ports reside on a secondary SATA header and can maintain their full bandwidth. The 4 drive bays reside on the primary SATA/SAS bridge and while they are all 3Gbps (280MB/s) ports, the SATA host has a maximum throughput of 800MB/s and loses some of that to overhead processes. Under the best circumstances we can get about 700MB/s real-world performance out of the internal bays.

It is interesting to note that the optical bay SATA ports are attached to a secondary SATA bridge. Would it not follow that, at least theoretically, running four SSDs, two connected to the drive bay SATA bridge and two connected to the optical SATA bridge, would maximize potential throughput for a Mac Pro that isn't running a PCIe SATA3 card?

Inquiring minds and all.