The Need for Speed...

Well by now you probably have a good feel for the the general consensus around Snow Leopard. Pretty rock solid release with some unfortunate incompatibilities with some software, although these are falling off pretty rapidly. The other big win for most people is speed with nearly all of the reports I've seen (via Twitter at least) experiencing a much snappier performance from their Mac.

I've now upgraded my main production Mac Pro and my MacBook Pro.

Both seem snappier and I've had relatively few problems. I did have some early problems with the Mac Pro following a kernel panic after the install after which the machine came back up with Snow Leopard installed but was a bit "flakey". A couple of apps kept crashing on me. A re-install of Snow Leopard seems to have fixed that.

Now the Mac Pro is one of the pre-Nahalem Mac Pros with 16GB RAM, so it's no slouch.

However, I noticed a tweet from my good buddy Victor Cajiao (@victorcajiao) from the Typical Mac user podcast who was rebuilding his Mac Pro with a new 10,000RPM system disk.

Hmm....

The drive Victor had chosen was the Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB - a bit of a speed monster. It transpires that he's been running his Mac Pro with another 10,000 RPM drive and loves it.

One of the main bottlenecks in modern machines is the speed of I/O from the hard disk. This impacts everything from Boot times, to application loading, to swap file performance and may other aspects of the perceived and actual performance of the machine. I'd never thought to upgrade the system disk in this way though - d'oh!

A quick google showed I could get the exact same disk from eBuyer over here is the UK for £160 plus VAT - ouch! Baring in mind, this is only a 300GB drive and you can pick up a 1TB drive for less than £50 but the price premium is for the speed, the quietness/coolness and build quality. Plus it comes with a 5 year warranty.

The 300GB is no big deal as it will only be used as the system drive for the OS and applications - plenty of room! All my data is stored either in the cloud via DropBox or on a RAID 0 array on the same machine (3 x 1TB) backed up of course by my Drobo.

OK, so I went for it!

I really need to do a clean install on the Mac Pro (actually, I probably don't) to clear off some of the older applications and have a pristine installation of Final Cut Studio. So when the new disk arrives, I'll remove the existing system drive and keep it safe, and do a fresh install of Snow Leopard and re-install my critical apps.

So that should see a significant boost on the performance of the Mac Pro!

Which leads me to the MacBook Pro.....

....but that's a different story for next time!

To follow my continuing saga about optimising my Macs to get the maximum speed possible, checkout the next related blog post Need for Speed (Part 2)...

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