After getting the new MacBook with an internal SSD that boots in seconds, I could not deal anymore with my old mid 2011 iMac. So I got a Transcend Thunderbold SSD 512 G and after cloning Macintosh HD to it, now enjoy the same speedy boot when El Capitan before took some two minutes at least, not to mention Thunderbird and iTunes taking forever.
Today I needed to quickly run some Windows tests and launched VMWare for the first time since that upgrade. For the first time in the many years I have used VMs, I see performances equivalent to a physical PC. Before, the VM was sluggish, and worse, it seems as though the running VM was slowing down the other apps.
Now I understand better why Norman swears by VM
The moral is : VM are not very good tools on machines with regular hard drives. Probably too much paging or something.
We’ve been using VMware products for virtualization since their first beta over fifteen years ago. Abundant memory and disk space are as important as the speed at which they can be read from and written to. RAID is good, an SSD is better and RAID with SSDs is best.
A really fast disk on a slow interface (ie/ an SSD on USB 1 or 2) won’t be as useful as a crappy slow drive on a really fast interface (say a 7200 RPM HD on a Thunderbolt interface)
And a really fast drive on a really fast interface is way better
I work on a 2008 macbookpro with 8Gb of ram and 1Tb SSD.
it is WAY faster then any new Mac with a standard HDD.
only if you’re making videos, the ssd is quite useless (and you need more the space than the speed for that)
or if you’re making ray tracing pictures.
for everything else, the drive speed is more important than the number of cores or their internal GHz…
SSDs are the single most important performance upgrade right now by far unless you’re talking about 3D games.
I can’t stand Windows on a HDD, much less Windows on a VM on a HDD. I can barely stand OS X on a HDD. As you’ve discovered, VMs run great on SSD equipped Macs. On a HDD they’re slow and they slow down the Mac side as well.
I’ve even put a SSD in an old TiBook 1 GHz that I keep around for occasionally running Mac OS 9 and old software. Mac OS 9 on a G4+SSD literally gives OS X on a Core i7+SSD a run for its money in terms of speed. (Obviously not in features or stability.) Everything is instant even with the old, slow, ATA interface.
Here’s hoping that XPoint from Intel and Micron lives up to the hype. Imagine if you didn’t have RAM and mass storage, you just had mass storage faster then RAM.
Since Mavericks, Mac OS X has become extremely heavy on disk. I noted that with external hard drives which LED never stop blinking, even when the machine is idle.
That probably explains the huge speed gain with some apps like Thunderbird as well.
I used to loathe Windows for its pagination, it seems Mac OS X has got the same bad habit. Plus indexation and what not.
One good thing about mobile devices is that using solid state storage has become commonplace, and indeed looking forward for XPoint.
The first thing I did with my first Macbook Pro, mid 2012, was replacing the 500 GB harddrive by an SSD one. Quite expensive those days, but really worth the money if you work with VM’s. Up till now, still the same, but SSD’s got cheaper.
SSD via slow interface is like a Rolls Royce on full a country road, which doesn’t make sense.
The TiBook was significantly faster afterwards. I was expecting either no improvement or a very small one. It was quite noticeable.
I believe OWC has test videos where they show G4 PowerBooks side by side, HDD vs. SSD. I can’t speak for G3 or earlier, but the G4 models definitely benefit from SSDs.
I really did not feel like doing open heart surgery on the iMac. Sorry, I have lost my soldering iron quite a while ago.
Thunderbolt SSD has brought VERY VERY significant improvements to my machine. That is all I wanted. Sure, if I was into boy’s competition, it is not as fast as SATA. But no need to burn rubber just yet. With my now fast enough for my purpose old machine, I will probably make enough money to buy the fastest iMac available next year without hacking my present computer hardware.
I wonder why some always need to rain on other’s parade :s
What’s a good benchmarking app I can use on OS 9 or Tiger 10.4.11?
Most apps launch instantly on either OS. Tiger boot time went from well over a minute to 32s (chime to login screen). OS 9 boot time is 52s (chime to desktop) but the extensions are holding it up. With extensions off it’s 30s to desktop. A good portion in either case is the RAM check while the screen is dark.
The only apps I can think of that launch “slow” are the two back ports of FireFox. Classilla on OS 9 takes 2s, and TenFourFox on Tiger takes 3s. Office 2001 launches faster (instantly) then the latest/greatest Office on El Capitan (2s).
[quote=225043:@Markus Winter]How did you hook it up, or which SSD did you use?
The 1GHz TiBook has an ATA-5 connection, so the max throughput is 100 MB/sec. What actual speed do you get?[/quote]
you can also use an mSata to PATA converter like this one : link text
then any mSata ssd goes inside (they are cheaper anyway I wouldnt trust too much any drive with pata today …)
not to mention that you can boost performance of any older Mac or PC just in replacing HDDs with SSDs…