Re: Mini: Replace Hard Disk w/ SSD (Solid State Drive)

Posted by Owen Densmore on Jul 04, 2013; 2:16am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Mini-Replace-Hard-Disk-w-SSD-Solid-State-Drive-tp7583384p7583387.html

On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Owen -

Good to hear...

 I *almost* gave over to putting an SSD into the (used) 15" MacBook Pro I just bought to replace my (worn to a frazzle) 13" MPB.   I talked myself out of it because I *also* wanted to increase the amount of onboard HDD space from my exisTing ~350GB and the priciness of a ~512G SSD was too shocking.  

Agreed, the sweet spot is 256GB today at least, $174.  The gorilla in the room for me is iTunes, at around 90GB.  I'll push that to the NAS. 

I have 2TB in my NAS and don't use *any* cloud (except Flickr and Blog and conventional Website), but I depend too much on having *everything* at my fingertips whether in the office or in the field and the field is often literally "in the field" despite now having iPhone/Cell tethering.

I don't fully understand the OSX (previously 10.6, now 10.8) memory and I/O management strategies as I would expect generous memory to go a long way and for hybrid HD/SSD technology to give 90% of the results at a fraction of the cost.  

Apple has always had poor swapping, have no reason why.  But after experiencing Lion on both the Mini and the Air, it was clear that was the problem.

Even with 8GB RAM on the Mini, the system was always sluggish.  No longer!

Do you, or others here have any experience with the Hybrid HD/SSD technology, in particular in the context of Mountain Lion?

I've not upgraded to ML, sticking with Lion until the Mavericks release.  Apple is in a bit of chaos in terms of new OSs, mainly due to the Back to the Mac strategy, which basically is sound.  But keeping phones, tablets, and computers aligned is non-trivial.

None the less, I'm going to "upgrade" a 5-year old laptop to SSD just to see how it works.  Its mainly used for music/news while exercising so I can take a risk.

   -- Owen

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