[rampancy]

Wow, been a long time since I've posted here...

Anyway. I've been shopping around and doing research for getting an SSD to upgrade an old Core 2 Duo (non-unibody) MacBook. The thing is, there are a whole lot of manufacturers and models out there, more than I thought. For anyone who's had experience with SSDs in older Macs, is there a brand/product line you'd recommend? I've looked into OCZ and Corsair but apparently their SSDs are highly unreliable.

[Maciej]

http://www.storagereview.com/buying_ssd_brand_matters

I've had multiple OCZ drives, they've all worked great. I haven't kept up with the evolution of controllers within the last few months - if I were buying a drive today I'd probably just get this: http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Series-2...tag=appl060-20 . It is the intel equivalent of the Vertex 3 - should be pretty reliable and fast. I know there's a Vertex 4 out there, but I haven't really read up on it.

FWIW, StorageReview has a leaderboard that rounds up the choices pretty nicely.

[Eugene]

OCZ and Corsair are only really seen as unreliable for a couple technicalities.

1) They usually enter the market with new technology first, so they suffer from "v1.0" bugs.
2) They sell high volume, so there are obviously more complaints.

Basically I would pick up drives from any of the manufacturers on the list Maciej posted...it just depends on who has the best sale at this point. For example last week the 256GB Crucial M4 was down to $199.

[GSpotter]

I have a Crucial M4 (128GB) in my 2006 MacPro. This drive had a bug which was fixed by a firmware update before I ran into that problem. For updating, I just had to burn a booteable cd which contained the updater. (I dont know which other manufacturers offer update procedures compatible with macs...)

[Maciej]

I guess if you're using this in a Mac, you should be mindful of garbage collection - or enabling TRIM (if you choose a controller with poor GC).

[rampancy]

Thanks for the suggestions and help everyone. I've been really weary of OCZ (so much so that I returned a 64 GB Petrol SSD that I'd just bought) since it seems that a lot of their drives fail fairly quickly (from what I've seen on comments on NewEgg and Amazon).

Seems like Intel and Samsung are the most reliable choices though. I've also heard a lot of good things about OWC's SSDs...I actually might end up going with their 60 GB Mercury Electra 3G, since it seems to be offered at a pretty good price compared to the competition.

Are there any specific chipset types I should look out for? I've also noticed that many SSDs are offered in 3 GB/s SATA 2 and 6 GB/s SATA 3. These drives should be backwards compatible with the 1.5 GB/s SATA in the old MacBook, right?

[Maciej]

I believe that in terms of garbage collection, and overall performance the SandForce SF-22xx controller is still the cream of the crop. Basically the OCZ Vertex 3's, Intel 520, OWC 6G, etc... I don't recall what the Electra uses (my guess would be SF-1200, see below it's actually an SF-2181, I don't know much about that chip - maybe Eugene can fill in if needed).

SandForce's last generation, SF-12xx, is also pretty good - more than sufficient for your application from what I can tell, since you're using SATA 1.0 you don't have as much bandwidth to try and saturate.

Go for the Electra, I believe they have a native Mac updater too, which is a real convenience as many manufacturers do not.

[Eugene]

I've never heard of the SF-2100 series until now.

Guessing its an SF-2281, but simply without the SATA III support? *shrug*

EDIT: Anand says it's similar to the SF-2281 except...

The other big difference is the number of byte lanes supported by the controller. The SF-2181 and above all support 8 NAND flash channels, however only the SF-2282 supports 16 byte lanes. Each NAND device is 8 bytes wide, supporting 16 byte lanes means that each channel can be populated by two NAND devices. This lets a single SF-2282 controller talk to twice as many NAND devices as a SF-2281.

So it looks like a cheaper option for extremely low capacity SSDs.

[rampancy]

Hmm. Interesting. Thanks again for the info, it's all fascinating stuff, learning about SSDs.

I've heard though that there was a problem with one particular line of SandForce controllers being chronically buggy and/or SandForce equipping their chipsets with bad firmware (apparently this is what prompted OCZ to go with another chipset vendor). Would the pair of you know anything more about that?

From what I've been getting in other forums, it looks like for the most part, budget-level SSDs just aren't worth it in terms of reliability or performance. That's sort of a downer as I was hoping to go for an good quality SSD >80 GB for less than $100 (or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places).

[drewprops]

Am I the only one still afraid of SSDs?

Reading this thread only underscores my fear.

There are so many crazy different manufacturers out there, how are you supposed to find the right, safe to use product?

Maybe it's because I became used to shopping between a handful of hard drive manufacturers, but I don't feel compelled to experiment like I might have 15 years ago.


...

[chucker]

There are a whopping two hard drive manufacturers left, so that's easy enough.

For SSDs, there appear to be many more, but there aren't really that many different controller manufacturers. Reliability can be a bit hit and miss, but hard drives — especially laptop ones — are hardly known for it either.

[Dave]

Originally Posted by drewprops There are so many crazy different manufacturers out there, how are you supposed to find the right, safe to use product?

I no longer recall my exact reasoning, but a while ago I concluded that I'd only purchase Intel or Sandforce-based SSDs.

FWIW, I don't think Apple shares my view, but then they have slightly lower-level access to hardware drivers than the average user...

[PB PM]

I have one of the supposedly terrible OCZ drives (60GB Agility 3) and it has been problem free for over 6 months. I think some of the issues have been blown out of perforation, kind of typical in the internet age.

[Moogs]

Here's a pretty awesome looking product.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1167...ate_drive.html

Slowly but surely we're getting to $1/GB (maybe within 6-8 months?), which is pretty reasonable given the speed increases and reliability increases. Once it goes below that people are going to have a field day and I suspect we'll see more reasonable BTO prices from Apple. Or at least I hope we do. They have no excuse for gouging people on commodity products like RAM or SSD. Maybe the new Mac Pro tweak (which made BTO RAM cheaper for the first time in... ever) will be a trend in that direction.

[ironlung]

Originally Posted by Moogs Here's a pretty awesome looking product. http://www.macworld.com/article/1167...ate_drive.html Slowly but surely we're getting to $1/GB (maybe within 6-8 months?), which is pretty reasonable given the speed increases and reliability increases. Once it goes below that people are going to have a field day and I suspect we'll see more reasonable BTO prices from Apple. Or at least I hope we do. They have no excuse for gouging people on commodity products like RAM or SSD. Maybe the new Mac Pro tweak (which made BTO RAM cheaper for the first time in... ever) will be a trend in that direction.

$1/GB in 6 to 8 months? We're past that already: I bought my 256 GB Crucial m4 for $200 almost two months ago. These have been trending for $180 since then. You can get a 500 GB SSD for ~$350-360