I have finished reconfiguring my Mac Pro with the addition of a 120GB OCZ Vertex 2 Solid State Drive as my boot drive, and I’m pretty pleased with the result. The system is faster overall and mostly noticeably so, though there are a few areas where I saw little performance improvement at all. I’ll show you some data in a few minutes that will illustrate what I’m talking about, but for now let me detail how I set my system up, why, and what I’ve learned from that.
My Mac Pro is a late 2008 model, with twin 2.8Ghz four-core Intel Xeon CPU’s, 16 GB RAM, an ATI Radeon 5770 video card, and a 12X Superdrive. Before the “upgrade” I was running a 1TB 3.5” Hitachi 7200 rpm hard drive as a boot drive, a 500GB 3.5” Maxtor 7200 RPM hard drive as a scratch drive, a 500GB 3.5” Maxtor 7200 RPM hard drive as a Boot Camp drive running Windows 7 Ultimate, and a 1.5TB 3.5” Seagate 7200 RPM hard drive as a Time Machine Disk. I have now replaced the Time Machine disk with a 2.5” Vertex 2 solid state drive of 120GB marketed capacity. (I say “marketed” because after formatting as an HFS+ drive, it showed about 115GB and during the Snow Leopard installation it showed only 106GB free.) I moved the Time Machine disk out to an Acomdata Firewire400/USB 2 external case whose power is controlled through an APC backup unit that automatically powers up and down with the Mac Pro. I set up the Vertex from scratch with a complete installation of every application I wanted to install, being sure to set up the User account so that the short and long names and password matched up exactly with the one on my old boot disk, the Hitachi 1TB. I installed all applications with this set-up, i.e., pointing toward the User account on the SSD. While I eventually intended to point the User account to the one on the Hitachi hard disk, having a separate one on the SSD would allow me to run all my applications and get e-mail if the Hitachi hard disk failed.
Once I had the SSD completely set up and had verified all my applications were working, I then went into System Preferences, Accounts, and unlocked it before right-clicking on my account name. The “Advanced Options” window popped up that, when selected, brought up a larger window that showed where the associated User account was. I clicked on a “Choose” button next to it and then selected the User account on the Hitachi hard disk I wanted to ultimately point to. It asked me to choose a “Reboot” and I did, and the machine rebooted on the SSD but using my user account on my Hitachi, i.e., the old boot drive.
While most of my applications launched without any modifications, my Adobe CS 5 applications almost universally crashed on launch. Suspecting that it had to do with permissions, I reselected the User account on the SSD, rebooted, and verified that all my CS 5 applications worked without complaint. I then right-clicked on my (short name) User folder on the Hitachi drive, and down in the “Sharings and Permissions” window clicked on the “+” sign and added myself (short name) to the list (system/admin/everyone) and selected “Read and Write” privileges and “Apply to all enclosed items” and then hit the “Apply” button. Once it completed, I went back up into Accounts in System Preferences and reset the User folder to the one on the Hitachi drive and rebooted; this time all my applications launched with no problems. This is the type of configuration I suspect most people are going to run in, i.e., with their applications only on an SSD and the rest of their data on a conventional hard drive, at least until prices fall where all hard drives can be SSD. (The next best thing would be to make your data drive a Velociraptor if you can afford to limit yourself to its current limited size.)
That said, running in this kind of configuration raises the question of what kind of performance hits am I taking by doing so? So, I’ll answer that question by sharing with you the data from some simple benchmark testing I did with my machine. It will also show you what kind of performance you can expect from running in a straight SSD set up where data and applications are both on the SSD.
Boot time:
Mac Pro using Hitachi hard disk as boot and data drive: 39.7 secs
Mac Pro using the Vertex 2 SSD as boot and data drive: 28.9 secs
Mac Pro using the Vertex 2 as the boot drive and Hitachi as data: 28.6 secs
Since I was using a manual stopwatch, I consider the two SSD times to be equal. This says there is no penalty for using a conventional hard drive for the User account. There is a 28% improvement in boot times using the SSD.
Shutdown time:
Mac Pro using Hitachi hard disk as boot and data drive: 9.8 secs
Mac Pro using the Vertex 2 SSD as boot and data drive: 9.7 secs
Mac Pro using the Vertex 2 as a boot drive and Hitachi as data: 9.4 secs
This says there is no significant difference in shutdown time with either type of disk in my system.
Application Launch Times:
Final Cut Pro 7
Mac Pro using Hitachi hard disk as boot and data: 17.5 secs
Mac Pro using SSD as boot and data: 5.6 secs
Mac Pro using Vertex 2 SSD as boot and Hitachi for data: 7.3 secs
This shows a 2X to 3X launch time improvement with this application. This time is time from start to first window (looking for camera) and not full application load.
Color V 1.5.3
Mac Pro using Hitachi hard disk as boot and data: 5.6 secs
Mac Pro using SSD as boot and data: 5.1 secs
Mac Pro using Vertex 2 SSD as boot and Hitachi for data: 4.7 secs
Amazingly, there was no performance gain using the SSD. I think this kind of thing is what you will sometimes see, depending on the file sizes needed for a particular application launch.
Photoshop CS 5
Mac Pro using Hitachi hard disk as boot and data: 10.9 secs
Mac Pro using SSD as boot and data: 2.7 secs
Mac Pro using Vertex 2 SSD as boot and Hitachi for data: 4.1 secs
Photoshop showed a significant improvement in launch time when using the SSD. It launched about 2.6X to 4X times faster. Most people are not going to have their data files on the SSD, however, so the 2.6X time is probably more representative.
Microsoft Word (Office 2011)
Mac Pro using Hitachi hard disk as boot and data: 10.5 secs
Mac Pro using SSD as boot and data: 1.6 secs
Mac Pro using Vertex 2 SSD as boot and Hitachi for data: 2.6 secs
Word showed a significant improvement in launch times when run from an SSD. This time was from application start to the Gallery window, not full application load.
Overall, I’m happy with the performance I’m seeing out of the Vertex 2. It didn’t hurt either that I got it on sale from Newegg for $199 ($169 after rebate). I thought it was worth both the money and time spent in reconfiguring to run the drive, though admittedly it would be worth more if I were using the machine for business. I’ll keep you abreast of how well things go from here. We’ll both be interested to see if I still feel it was worth it a year from now.