The Need for Speed (Part 4)...

OK, confession time... I'm never satisfied!

I previously wrote about my obsession with tweaking the last ounce of speed from my MacBook Pro by installing a hideously expensive Solid State Drive (SSD) into the laptop. As it turns out, the SSD made a huge difference to the overall performance of the laptop, transforming it into a speed demon.

Now of course, when I'm in the studio, during my normal working hours (normal working hours?) I'm chained to my Mac Pro as my main production machine. This is an early 2008 model, i.e. Pre nahalem chipset, but it's no slouch! It's a quad core machine with 2 x 2.8Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and 16GB RAM. The disk configuration is a single 1TB 7200RPM system disk with three 750GB HDs in a RAID 0 striped set. 

In this configuration, my unscientific timings for various common operations are as follows:

Not too shabby!

Let's just step back a bit though, to when Snow Leopard was launched (and before I'd even considered SSD drives) when I noticed a Tweet from my good friend Victor Cajiao of The Typical Mac User Podcast 

Victor also has a Mac pro and had decided to replace his system drive with the 300GB WD VelociRaptor drive. This is a 10,000 RPM drive in a 2.5" form factor but built into a pretty neat 3.5" cast metal sled that acts as a mount and as a heat sink. This baby can attach to a Mac Pro disk bracket, and slide right in. The performance figures were pretty impressive, and the drive was available for £200 inc VAT in the UK.

So I bit the bullet!

The drive was simple to install and quiet in operation. I did notice a significant bump in speed too:

 

Boot times were significantly faster and in general the machine felt a lot snappier and quicker in general operation. The only anomaly was the  iTunes timings but as I load my iTunes library from a network share, it may have been an issue on the network.

So, I was happy as Larry! 

Then I got the SSD drive for my MacBook Pro......

Hmmm....

Part 5 of the saga to follow ;-)

PS You can see the previous parts of the saga here: Original Post, Part 2, Part 3

Comments

[Ian]

Hi Don,
Can't wait to hear the results from the SSD(?!). Thanks for posting all this info, I find it very useful to see what the differences are. Great work.
Thanks, Ian

[figaro]

Hi Don,

Thanks for sharing. I'm going to buy a news iMac 27" with a 7200 HDD (already very expensive so I can't think of a Mac Pro :/) but it's very interesting !