SSD in the House!
by Dbot on Jul.23, 2009, under Uncategorized
The Fast and the Furious...
The G.Skill Falcon arrived today and I got a little bit of play time with it. I’ll do more on it later, but for now here are some first impressions. First, it comes excellently packaged. It’s a 2.5 incher, so it’s nice and light and compact. Installation is a breeze, just like any other drive. Oh…and it’s freakin’ fast! Yeah, for real. I only did a couple of time trials, but as you’ll see it impresses.
The drive I was using as my OS drive in the Hackintosh is a 500GB 7200RPM WD Black with 32MB cache. Great drive (I use a 640GB WD Black in my PowerMac…both have been solid.) I didn’t have time to really dig in for benchmarks so I just chose to time booting and a couple of big, slow loading apps to time. Results were as follows:
WD Black
Boot Time: 25 seconds from boot loader to desktop
Photoshop CS4: 9 seconds (that surprised me)
Xcode: 6 seconds.
G.Skill Falcon SSD
Boot Time: 16 seconds from boot loader to desktop
Photoshop CS4: 3 seconds
Xcode: 2 seconds
Big improvements!! Those are the slow loaders, normal apps like Safari, iCal etc load pretty much instantaneously. This system was already fairly quick and responsive for most tasks, but with the SSD I can tell that things run smoother and, as the numbers above attest, load times are dramatically faster. Now, if I can just swing another one somehow so I can get some RAID 0 action going 
-D
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July 24th, 2009 on 6:24 am
jealous…
good deal my friend
so when are you going to throw it or bang it up/
July 24th, 2009 on 10:45 am
Cool! Did you just Ghost your original drive when you did this? Any particular reason why you chose the Falcon drive? Just wondering if there’s a particular known brand that I should stick with or stay away from when it comes to SSD.
July 24th, 2009 on 12:54 pm
Yeah, I used SuperDuper (free for basic usage) to clone the drive over and then installed the bootloader to the SSD and was pretty much rockin’ and rollin’. The only thing that caught me thinking for a couple of minutes was that my vid card went back to software rendering, but that was because of how I reinstalled the boot loader. Took 3 seconds and a reboot to fix. The G.Skill Falcon is identical to the super popular OCZ Vertex hardware wise but was like 75 bucks cheaper. There was another option, the Corsair P128, that was even cheaper after rebate but the performance of the Falcon/Vertex was better so I went for that. Gonna be fun banging around on it some more this weekend. Next upgrade….Quad Core, baby!!
-D
July 24th, 2009 on 4:21 pm
Good deal man.