Holy shit- those were my words when I compared the performance of an SSD drive on my Mac Pro- the Intel X25-M 80GB SSD drive to be exact. Let me start off by saying that a couple of months back, I was looking into getting some additional speed out of my Gen-1 Mac Pro. I had upgraded the RAM to 6GB and installed the 8800GT for best gaming performance, however, loading times were still high even with my 400GB SATA2 drive.



So I decided to replace with my 400GB drive with two 750GB drives in RAID0 using the onboard controller. The 1.5TB volume did indeed give my I/O performance a shot in the arm and I was enjoying the burst of speed in launching applications and copying files across. I was satisfied.  Then came the Nehalem kit that Intel sent for testing a couple of week back and with it was Intel’s X25-M.

Now, I’ve read about SSD performance on the web but I figured that my two 750GB Seagate 7200.11 drives in RAID0 are working beautifully and mighty fast. Going from a single 400GB drive to a 1.5TB RAID0 setup gave me about 1.5x-2x performance and I figured the SSD would gave me somewhat similar results over my RAID setup. Boy, was I wrong.

The first obstacle was the 2.5” drive that Intel sent doesn’t exactly fit in a Mac Pro with all 3.5” hard drive bays. However, it being a SATA specification drive, the connection wasn’t the issue.  This didn’t prove to be any challenge that some tape couldn’t fix. While the SATA connector somewhat held the drive, three tapes on either side provided enough re-enforcement.



Next, I imaged Leopard on to a hard drive partition from which I wound install the O/S (yes, to all Windows users, you can install OS X from an HD partition- no need for a DVD). I booted from this partition and started installing Leopard. This was when my jaw hit the floor- Leopard installed in under SIX minutes. Yes, I had taken all the Printer and Language packs out, but it was enough to prepare me on what was about to come.


Once OS X was installed, I measured the time it took to boot right from the time the grey screen appears after the chime. My single 400GB partition took about 26 seconds and the RAID didn’t help much- taking 27 seconds. The SSD took 14 seconds. Before the second time the loading wheel could complete its rotation, I was on the desktop.

I did some more tests such as copying the WoW directory onto the same drive to another folder as well as launching Excel which I feel takes the longest in Office 2008. Xbench’s Hard Drive bench was also used and the following table outlines all the scores from all three drives.

   500GB Drive
 1.5TB RAID0
80GB SSD
 Boot Time
 26s 27s
 14s
 WoW Folder Copy (10.6GB)
 508s 234s
150s
 Excel Launch
 12s 8s
2s
 XBench Hard Drive
 62 143
 249
 Sequential Read
 79 84
135
 Sequential Write
 72
274
134
 Random Read
 90
 119
2156
 Random Write
 19
59
618


As you can see, Excel launched in two seconds. Firefox, Word and Entourage only took 1 second each. Application loading times are just incredibly fast with the Intel X25-M and the computer feels extremely Snappy. Spotlight is instant.

The small capacity of SSD drives certainly prevent it from being used as your one and only drive but I would highly recommend the Intel X25-M as your boot and applications drive along with a secondary 750GB or 1TB drive as your data drive.

Yes, it is expensive but it certainly gives a much needed boost to arguably the slowest component of your computer. Being non-mechanical should also decrease the failure rate but that is something I cant comment as I haven’t used them enough. Last and certainly not the least, SSDs are also supposedly more energy efficient. To sum it up, they are indeed the future of mass storage in our computers.