Looking for an SSD?

[Ellis Vener]

Lloyd Chambers offers a little guidance to what to look for in SSD performance: http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2014/20141115_1122-SSDs-not-created-equal.html

I concede he is a big fan of OWC products but that's an assessment  which from my own experience that I agree with him about . He has more to say about the 6G OWC SSDs here: http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html

[Torbjörn Tapani]

I was under the impression that Samsung 850 drives were the ones to beat. What did Lloyd have to say about them?

[deejjjaaaa]

Lloyd Chambers offers a little guidance to what to look for in SSD performance: http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2014/20141115_1122-SSDs-not-created-equal.html

and so what he did with the hard drive pictured ? put some program that writes say 500 mb/sec to that poor SSD for 14 hours w/o interruption ? that will be 24TB written data and only 3% decline - not bad endurance, right ?

[langier]

Last year I bought a SanDisk 480GB SSD for my 2009 MacPro, cloned my old HD with 10.6.8 over to it then updated it to 10.8 so that my orphaned software could still be used as needed. My older drive still has the OS installed and I boot to it perhaps once a month to use older software no longer compatible in addition to using this drive for temporary image storage as I download, screen and edit the photos before I archive and back-up my photos. No real complaints about the SanDisk. It boots faster and programs load quickly. So far so good after 18 months of use.

IMO, any of current faster SSDs will give you better performance than a spinning platter drive. I don't think you can really do wrong with adding an SSD to your system and squeeze some more performance out of your system.

From my experience OWC does stand behind its products and their prices are competitive.

With the price of many 480-512GB drives in the 200-300 range, and smaller capacity drives even cheaper, they are even more affordable now, an inexpensive upgrade along with maxing out the RAM to get more from older systems.

[dwswager]

Lloyd Chambers offers a little guidance to what to look for in SSD performance: http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2014/20141115_1122-SSDs-not-created-equal.html

I concede he is a big fan of OWC products but that's an assessment  which from my own experience that I agree with him about . He has more to say about the 6G OWC SSDs here: http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html

I've been building my own computers since the late 1980s.  My Home Theater PC, 9TB Windows Home Server, and i7 desktops all have SSDs as the boot drive.  Just swapped out the desktop Intel for Samsung of larger size. So does my Asus UL30vt laptop.  At the outset, the Intel drives were both the fastest and most reliable.  Then the OZC drives took over.  Now the Crucial and Samsung.  Unless you have a specialty application that requires it, wait on the Samsung 850s and go with the 840s.

Consumer SSD Reviews

Enterprise SSD Reviews

Selecting the Best Samsung SSD for Intensive Desktop Workloads

[phila]

For you 2013 MacPro users:

https://eshop.macsales.com/preorder/OWC-Aura-SSD-for-Mac-Pro/