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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Macbook Pro and Solid State
Joseph Toth, Photographer
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Cambridge | UK | United Kingdom | Posted: 12:18 PM on 04.06.10 |
->> I sent out an equipment Q and A, but I thought I would ask here in case some of you don't have Macbook Pro selected as one of your topics.
I am thinking of putting a Solid State Drive in my Macbook Pro. I know a few people who have done so and rave about the performance. However, none of these people are photographers. My concerns are the long term affects saving, erasing, saving again will have on the SSD. I haven't met another photographer who has one on their laptop. Any real world pros and cons would be helpful. I am not looking at storage space as I tend to move images of the laptop to external storage very quickly.
Thanks
Joe |
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Max Simbron, Photographer, Assistant
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Phoenix | AZ | USA | Posted: 2:39 PM on 04.06.10 |
->> I'm on a 17mbp 3.06 with a 120gb SSD. Performance is stellar, and I use this for anything from photography to audio editing to video, as well as office apps. I boot camp, so I use it in XP and Snow Leopard.
I will say that it can sometimes slow down, as in a file transfer almost seems to get stuck momentarily, then starts up and zips along. I've only had this laptop a few months.
I also use a Dell mini 9 with a 64GB SSD, hacked to Snow Leopard, and use it all the time to transmit, and it works great.
So far the big con is the cost/space ratio. But let's say that, after a year or two, you might experience some slowdown, couldn't you just put in a new ssd or even a standard HD? It would come t a price, but standard laptop hdd's are cheap, and ssd's are getting cheaper by the week.
I guess what I'm saying is that by the time the SSD has any problems, you'll probably have outgrown the laptop and need another one, or would be willing to invest in upgrading it. |
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Joseph Toth, Photographer
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Cambridge | UK | United Kingdom | Posted: 4:27 PM on 04.06.10 |
->> Thanks Max, that is the type of information I was looking for. My main concern is saving thousands of image files and slowing down the SSD quicker than a normal user might.
Thanks again. |
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Max Simbron, Photographer, Assistant
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Phoenix | AZ | USA | Posted: 7:21 PM on 04.06.10 |
->> Joseph,
ultimately filling up an SSD is going to produce a hit on speed, but even if you keep it relatively empty (by moving files off the SSD onto a hard drive), it's going to still consider the "blocks" that hold the data as full. Read this article (and specifically this page) for the explanataion:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/6
and how to "fix" your drive to work like new:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/11
and the part that concerns you:
Most people don’t fill up their drives, so SSD controller makers get around the problem by writing to every page on the drive before ever erasing a single block.
If you go about using all available pages to write to and never erasing anything from the drive, you’ll eventually run out of available pages. I’m sure there’s a fossil fuel analogy somewhere in there. While your drive won’t technically be full (you may have been diligently deleting files along the way and only using a fraction of your drive’s capacity), eventually every single block on your drive will be full of both valid and invalid pages.
In other words, even if you’re using only 60% of your drive, chances are that 100% of your drive will get written to simply by day to day creation/deletion of files. |
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