Solid State Disks on Mac

**Jirka Jirout** · 01-20-2008, 04:26 PM

Has anyone experimented with solid state disks recently? I have purchased 4GB module from Transcend ( http://ec.transcendusa.com/product/p...ory.asp?Cid=59 ) and I am going to play around a bit.

The idea is to connect this disk either in place of the internal DVD drive or using a FireWire -> IDE adapter (FW HDD case). The SSD will only be used for System, the applications, the most basic user settings and the sleepimage file. The rest, especially the swap files, will still go to the normal 2.5 HDD in the mini.

The goal is to minimize the wake-up and boot time. What should I expect? My tests with Compact Flash cards a while ago were rather mixed.

**Bugbyte** · 01-21-2008, 11:26 AM

Seems like the tests with solid state on the Windows side have not had much effect at shortening the boot time. It seems that although there is plenty of memory on the cheap, if you want faster boot times, you need to buy the faster memory. I've seen this SanDisk Extreme III mentioned as a good choice.

On the Windows side, to speed up the load and fit the OS into the chip, they use nLite to strip down the size by leaving out services they don't need. I haven't seen that done on OSX but it wouldn't surprise me if you could do the same.

It seems like the main reason for installing it is reliability and performance in low temps that affect the drives.

**Jirka Jirout** · 01-21-2008, 11:49 AM

Originally Posted by Bugbyte

On the Windows side, to speed up the load and fit the OS into the chip, they use nLite to strip down the size by leaving out services they don't need. I haven't seen that done on OSX but it wouldn't surprise me if you could do the same.

Of course you can do the same with OS X. There is so much stuff that you do not need for in-car installation :-) Just look at all the kexts, desktop images... It does not reduce the boot times as much as it does on Windows, but disk footprint can reduced significantly.

**pepsibobby** · 01-21-2008, 01:38 PM

also take out all of the unneeded apps, fonts, printer drivers...things you might miss.

**Bugbyte** · 01-21-2008, 05:16 PM

Originally Posted by Jirka Jirout

Of course you can do the same with OS X. There is so much stuff that you do not need for in-car installation :-) Just look at all the kexts, desktop images... It does not reduce the boot times as much as it does on Windows, but disk footprint can reduced significantly.

How do you do that? What is the equivalent of nLite for OSX?

**Punky** · 01-21-2008, 07:50 PM

from my research, it won't give you that much of a boot time increase, and it seems to be a lot slower than our standard IDE/SATA drive right now.
I'm debating on doing the same thing as you, and i decided to wait for the real SSD HD to come down in price.

**tagmp** · 01-21-2008, 08:58 PM

I'm using an Mtron 16Gb solid state drive. I have windows and streetdeck loaded on it and another drive for mp3's, videos etc.. The Mtron is a little pricey, I found this one on E-bay for $400. But it's the fastest out there (you should see how quick windows comes out of hibernation), I ran a benchmark and it came back with 89mb/s read and 87mb/s write, which is slower than Mtron claims it. I'm guessing it has to do with the controller. Overall, I'm very satisfied, the price to me is worth the convenience.

**Bugbyte** · 01-22-2008, 12:36 PM

Edited thread title to specify this is a Mac discussion to prevent confusion.

**Jirka Jirout** · 01-22-2008, 03:13 PM

Originally Posted by Bugbyte

How do you do that? What is the equivalent of nLite for OSX?

I do not use any special tools. It is mostly manual work. For Tiger I also made a few scripts that remove what I consider superfluous (plus they activate the hibernation mode, install the proper display extensions etc.).

For Leopard, I will eventually make them as well, but I do not have them yet.

**ClaZ** · 02-02-2008, 03:31 AM

I'm considering the some thing for my iBook only i will use the CF format to utilyze on a IDE-CF interface.
This, because the iBook have a great problem on the motherboard. The Ide connector on it, is made with a very bad material that at low temperature, make the link with the disk very inconsistent.
At low temp (like +1 or +2 degree) the drive random disappear. Under this value (0° or less) the drive is not present at all... and this is my actual situation...

Now i try to put the system on the 1TB Raid to recover the file on this disk.
How fast is a raid0 used as startup disk ? More or less than the IDE 7200rpm internal disk ?

Problems... stress... ever and ever and ever....