The Mobo-Bear: Elric Phares over at www.motherboards.org did a nice real-word and straight-forward video of a Super Talent FTM28GX25H 2.5-Inch 128GB UltraDrive ME SATA2 Solid State Drive vs one of the absolute fastest traditional spinning platter drives: the WD Velociraptor 150 - on Apple Mac's running OSX. This clip should tell you all you need to know: This Super Talent solid-state drive beats the pants off the best 'old fashioned' disk drive made. So what are you waiting for?

Oh it was all a brief TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT as hardcore SSD 'enthusiasts' found some speed limits in the only-just-shipping 2009 MacBookPro's SATA controller. Well, to stop all the WHINING - Apple released a Firmware update to shut them up. So there. We now have a fix, those of you who just had to have the barely a week old MacBook Pro, and just had to gut it and slap in a high-end SATA II class bleeding edge SSD - and just had to whine about reduced performance: Here ya go. Download it, run it, and resume measuring your weenies:

"MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.7 addresses an issue reported by a small number of customers using drives based on the SATA 3Gbps specification with the June 2009 MacBook Pro. While this update allows drives to use transfer rates greater than 1.5Gbps, Apple has not qualified or offered these drives for Mac notebooks and their use is unsupported."

It seems only the Windows - and occasionally Linux folk have the equipment, time, patience and funding to really deep-bench the assault of SSD's hitting the marketplace. (Having good PR and industry connections sending you freebie SSD's to test doesn't hurt either...) Over on the Mac side, MacWorld is likely the only Mac-specific resource to have the lab to benchmark things on that level - but I've yet to see them tackle SSD benchmarking on Mac OSX like they should. In the meantime, Rob over at Bare Feats puts tons of Mac hard drive options thru their paces in more detail than any one else on the Apple side of things.

Over on ZDnet, Jason D. O'Grady gives his take on benchmarks of OSX 10.5.6 on a Runcore brand SSD in a high-end 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro over the MacBook's stock 5400 RPM Western Digital Blue series drive:

"As you can see from the results table the Runcore Pro IV almost doubled the HDD’s performance in sequential reads and writes... But that’s only the beginning. The Pro IV slaughtered the standard SATA HDD in random reads where it’s six times faster and in random writes where its over three times faster. When tested moving larger files (2-10MB and 20-100MB) the SSD more than doubles the performance of the HDD.
So there you have it, the Runcore Pro IV delivers up to 6x more performance over a standard HDD. If you’re a professional that uses your notebook for 8+ hours a day to earn a living you really can’t afford not to have a Runcore SSD."
Numbers freaks should check out Jason's post above, but the words in bold here tell most what you need to know: The current crop of SSD drives are running circles around the average hard drive - and can and will dramatically increase your productivity.

http://www.mac-ssd-drives.com/

Tags: OSX ssd benchmarks, OSX solid-state drive benchmarking

www.benchmarkreviews.com continues to provide some of the most exhaustive and extensive testing, benchmarking, and analysis of Solid-State drive performance. Deep Geek numbers type folk may wish to explore some of the following linked articles to SSD's tested and reviewed so far:

• ACARD ANS-9010 DDR2 SATA RAM-Drive
• Crucial / Lexar 32GB 2.5" SATA-2 SSD CT32GBFAB0
• G.Skill 64GB MLC 2.5" SATA-2 SSD FM-25S2S-64GB
• G.Skill Titan 128GB SATA SSD FM-25S2S-128GBT1
• Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 2.5" 40GB SATA 5,400 RPM HDD HTS541640J9SA00 (8MB Cache Buffer)
• Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 2.5" 60GB SATA 7,200 RPM HDD HTS721060G9SA00 (8MB Cache Buffer)
• Intel 80GB X25-M SATA SSD SSDSA2MH080G15E
• Kingston 80GB SATA SSD SSDSA2MH080G1GC
• MemoRight GT 64GB 2.5" SATA SSD MR25.2-064S
• Mtron Pro 7500 32GB SATA-II SSD MSP-SATA7525
• Mtron Pro 7000 16GB 2.5-Inch 16GB SSD SATA7025
• Mtron MOBI 3000 16GB 2.5" SATA SSD MSD-SATA3025
• Mtron MOBI 3500 64GB 3.5" SATA SSD MSD-SATA3535-064
• OCZ 64GB 2.5" SATA SSD OCZSSD64GB
• OCZ SATA-II 32GB 2.5" SSD OCZSSD2-1S32G
• OCZ Core Series SATA-II SSD OCZSSD2-1C64G
• OCZ SATA-II 64GB 2.5" SSD OCZSSD2-1S64G
• OCZ Apex 120GB SATA SSD OCZSSD2-1APX120G
• OCZ Vertex 120GB SATA SSD OCZSSD2-1VTX120G
• OCZ Vertex EX 120GB SATA SLC SSD OCZSSD2-1VTX120G
• Patriot Warp 128GB SATA-II SSD PE128GS25SSDR
• Samsung 64GB 2.5" SATA-2 SSD MCCOE64G5MPP-0VA
• Seagate 7200.11 500GB 3.5" ST3500320AS 7,200 RPM SATA-II Hard Disk Drive (32MB Cache Buffer)
• Super Talent MasterDrive MX 60GB 2.5" SATA-II SSD FTM60GK25H
• Silicon Power 64GB 2.5" SATA SSD SP064GBSSD25SV10
• Silicon Power 32GB SLC SATA-II SSD SP032GBSSD750S25
• Western Digital Raptor 74GB 3.5" WD740ADFD 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Disk Drive (16MB Cache Buffer)
• Western Digital VelociRaptor 150GB WD1500HLFS 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Disk Drive (16MB Cache Buffer)

Tags: solid state drive performance

For SSD benchmark freaks: Here's an absolutely great post at the OCZ Technology Forums: Macintosh based SSD tests run on a Vertex Series SSD in a Unibody MacBook.

Benchmarked are Apple's Mac OS X Version 10.5.6 Leopard as well as Windows 7 running via Apple's BootCamp - and also compares the OCX Vertex Series SSD laptop drives to an excellent alternative to an SSD, one of the fastest conventional platter SATA drives: the WD Scorpio Series Hard Drive 2.5" spinning disk drives.

Impressive SSD read-write numbers, app launch timings, and SSD speed improvements are detailed. If you weren't sure if you were ready for a solid-state drive on your Macintosh - this should convince you. Here's a tidbit on launch times of Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 - which has become quite big and bloated:

	1st run (WD Scorpio HDD)	1st run (OCZ Vertex SSD)
Entourage	18.6 sec	5 sec
Mac Excel	5.1 sec	2.2 sec
MS Word	8.5 sec	2.1 sec
Powerpoint	4.9 sec	3.5 sec

Tags: mac ssd benchmarks, vertex benchmarks, fastest ssd