Single SSD in a MacBook Pro

Hi everyone,

My setup has consisted so far of MacBook ver 6,2 8GB RAM and several WD FW 800 RAID 0 HDDs.

I'm considering an upgrade and wonder whether just a single super fast (e.g. Samsung 840 Pro 500 GB) wouldn't be enough rather than swapping the HD for a small SSD and swap the SuperDrive bay for my 7200 rpm HDD for projects.

It appears to me that running both the app and a single short project from the boot drive big enough (500 GB) with a super fast SSD must beat a dual SSD + 7200 SATA drive which wouldn't in any case be able to climb to the speeds of SSD, even if the app sits on it.

Your opinions? I'm trying to stay on a budget, because this is only for pleasure and suppose this would be the least investment with a huge improvement as the HDD is the biggest bottleneck at the moment. Even the RAM, when I checked it, was just fine.

Thanks for your opinions!
Roman

Regardless of the size of the project, I would not recommend running your FCPX application and OSX on the same drive as your projects and events. This will surely cause issues with all project format sizes but particularly with high definition and high framerate projects. Move the latter two items to another drive for best performance. A FW 800 7200 RPM drive or any SATA drive that is separate from the OS and app will give you performance better than running everything from a fast SSD.

The SSD will make FCPX extremely snappy and if your accessing media from another drive volume I believe you get the best band for your buck.

Thank you for such a fast response. I find it hard to believe that a 100MB/s maximum throughput on external FW800 could beat an internal SSD running close to 400MB/s, but I'm taking your opinion seriously.

How can SSD make FCPX so snappy is also beyond my understanding, since I don't complain about the startup time, but about the speed of jumping from clip to clip, viewing waveforms, skimming, etc.

In these I suppose the access time for the projects/events is much more important than the access time to the app itself, which probably runs entirely from memory once it's started up.

Another factor might be whatever handles the skimming/corrections/waveforms display, be it the processor or the graphics adapter.

I was toying with the idea of building a hackintosh (which I'd probably hate too soon if only for its looks) with a 4core xeon and the ATI radeon offered for the entry level Mac Pro, since it is quite cheap, not way much more than just buying a big enough SSD. But, I'm digressing....

The speeds you mention are theoretical. They assume direct access to reading and writing data with no other resource bottlenecks. When your operating system and applications are running at the same time you are trying to stream video and audio content there is a bottleneck and things tend to get sluggish and erratic. This doesn't occur when the media and project files are located on a different volume.

Not everything from FCPX is running from ram once the application launches. There needs to be access to other system resources and there is some handshaking between the app and the OS and the virtual page files created by the system disk.

General comments for no particular reason...

SSD is faster than HDD.

RAID (0, 1, 5, 6 for video) is faster than a single drive.

If you run OS, app, media from a single SDD then it becomes slower than HDD.

If your run OS, app, media from a single HDD then it becomes even slower than an old 3.5" floppy.

If you run OS, app from SSD, media from HDD, it is faster than a pure HDD system.

If you run OS, app from one SSD, media from one or more other SSDs, you have about as fast of a system as you'll get.

Internal drives are faster than externals (except for T'bolt).
Externals should be FW800 or T'bolt (jury is out on USB 3).
All HDDs should be 7200rmp.

No Mac made to date does full 6GB SATA or SSD.

Never expect real world performance to match numbers on a white paper. As stated, there are many factors involved. Data bus latency, read/write head latency, connector latency, cable latency, RAM thrashing latency, buffer latency, CPU heat throttling (when a CPU hits a heat limit the system slows it down), etc, etc, etc.

Look at already successfully operating systems and how they're configured.

BenB wrote: General comments for no particular reason...
If you run OS, app from one SSD, media from one or more other SSDs, you have about as fast of a system as you'll get.

Excellent overview. Since I just bought a bus-powered external for quickie edit sessions, I will wait on internal drives upgrades. When I'm a bit more flush and SSDs come down more in price, I'd like to replace both the Optical and HDD within the MBP. I have been researching this lately and ran into numerous posts where for a technical reason I can't remember, it was said that an SSD will not be faster for a media drive then a standard HHD. Although this type of SSD may be the exception and the future-

eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6G/

Dave

How does an SSD with much faster seek/read/write speeds not be faster than an HDD for a media drive? That makes no logical sense.

6GB SSDs will really rock when Apple puts 6GB data buses in their Macs.

BenB wrote: How does an SSD with much faster seek/read/write speeds not be faster than an HDD for a media drive? That makes no logical sense.

6GB SSDs will really rock when Apple puts 6GB data buses in their Macs.

I agree with that, but I read a ton of posts last night mostly from places like Tomshardware.com, that said with current SSDs there would no real gain with video. Sorry, I don't remember the explanation, but it made sense when I read it.

If I can dig up one of these posts in my browser history, I'll post it here for you to look at.

Dave

DaveG wrote:
If I can dig up one of these posts in my browser history, I'll post it here for you to look at.

Here's something I found:
thessdreview.com/Forums/ssd-discussion/2335.htm
"Just remember that some modern SSDs don't handle highly compressed data as fast as others: Sandforce drives perform better with compressible data."

www.tomshardware.com/forum/292656-32-video-editing
" But other than that extra quick responsiveness I did not see much other improvement in actual use for editing and rendering speeds because compressed data is rather CPU heavy. If you start editing raw, uncompressed (or low compressed) footage (like lagarith), then you will see a huge performance boost because there is less load on the CPU, and more load on the drives, so for that workflow SSDs would make more sense... but you would need some nice big drives."

forum.notebookreview.com/solid-state-dri...who-edit-videos.html
"The general feeling I get from what I've found is that the SSD is great for making applications load up faster, but not really a big help for actually processing the video, and worse, the repeated reads and writes might drastically shorten the life of the devices too. Hopefully someone with the aforementioned experience can chime in though."

My conclusion is that I don't know for sure and SSDs are still too expensive. But like you said, when I can afford them, I will swap out both internal drives for SSDs. Although first, I'll bump the RAM up to 16 GB from 8.

Dave

Firstly, many thanks for all your feedback!

@BenB: I like your 'irrefutable-fact listing'. If all you write are hard facts, I'd be interested to understand how if starting up a MacBook with all CS6 apps open is so often used to demonstrate the speed of SSD-upgraded machine, if the same principle, parallel reads would not work with FCPX. I mean most of the stuff where the slowness occurs *is* during skimming, thus reading footage from the same SSD that runs the app. These are certainly less parallel reads than the often demonstrated startup of multiple apps from SSD.

RAID0 should be faster than a single disk, but I think WD Mybook II Pro, or whatever it's called is providing pretty bad performance in Mountain Lion, not to mention the freeze ups due to lack of compatibility with the newest system. If I install a 7200 rpm single drive in the 2nd bay (SuperDrive) I will probably beat a RAID0 Firewire 800 configuration, correct?

I've been reading the same Tom's Hardware articles and been googling for the past few weeks, often coming to the same sources. That's why I wrote to your guys, because only someone with real world experience can provide useful feedback. Numbers can be very misleading with SSDs. I have compared several ways of boosting my FCPX performance and since I'd like to wait till I upgrade my whole system I've decided to swap my SuperDrive for my current 7200rpm 500GB Seagate and add an SSD for the system and cache. I understand a 60 GB SSD would be enough but so far I'm settled on getting a 120 GB Samsung 840 Pro, because the price looks right and the speed and reliability is one of the best. Hope I'm not going to screw up on something like "oh, but that drive is particularly bad for video editing due to its use of processor resources for compressible data, etc, etc.".

Do I have your go?

Thanks again,
Roman

Don't quote me as saying "irrefutable facts" when I never used that term. I never said all I ever write are hard facts.

RAID anything on FW will be limited to the FW speed. FW800 itself is the bottleneck in a FW RAID.

Internal SATA anything is faster than FW800 anything. But, I don't know if laptop Superdrives are on a SATA data bus. I know in a Mac Pro they're not, so you lose a little speed because it is ATA, not SATA, technically. Have not used one myself so I don't now what real world performance is.

Yes, SSDs use a compression scheme, but it is built-in to their controller card. And I'm using a single SSD T'bolt drive on a rMBP 15", and it vastly out performs editing the same things with a FW800 drive. So there goes that theory in real world experience.

Now, those articles are mostly speculation, not based on real world tests. The statements about video editing are not based on tests they did directly, but on theory about compression, etc. To quote, "Hopefully someone with the aforementioned experience can chime in though." So, according to them, the SSD inside each Mac laptop is actually slowing down video editing? Is that it?

All I know is my single drive T'bolt SSD is out performing FW800 with FCP X by vastly huge amounts. I have a series of tests scheduled for this weekend to see how it stacks up against my MP's internal SATA.

BenB wrote: All I know is my single drive T'bolt SSD is out performing FW800 with FCP X by vastly huge amounts. I have a series of tests scheduled for this weekend to see how it stacks up against my MP's internal SATA.

Excellent. I look forward to seeing the read/write results. Yes, some real tests that are not mere speculation would be great.

It does appear that the newer SSDs are able to handle compression better. A lot of web posts/blogs discussing SSDs for video are old enough that they may not be taking into account the faster SSDs out today like the Mercury Extreme-
eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Mercury_Extreme_Pro_6G/

Dave

BenB wrote: Don't quote me as saying "irrefutable facts" when I never used that term. I never said all I ever write are hard facts.

Thanks @BenB for your reply, which I read with great interest! Regarding my "quoting", I only meant to stress those words, not quote you (reason for single quotes). Sorry if I created a misunderstanding!

Looking forward to your tests and still wondering myself what the best move will be. How I wish Apple put an eSATA to these MacBooks! Maybe I can sell and exchange for a 17" with PCI express until I get the retina. BTW, may I ask you how playing 1080p videos looks on your rMBP? Is the scaling visible and thus the impression degraded as opposed to non retina models?

I just received in the mail today the OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini- 750GB 7200rpm bus-powered external drive. I copied over my Events and Projects and needed media from my main RAID FCP X drive.

I ran QuickBench 4.0 on it when connected via FW800 and got:
Write- 62 MB/s, Read- 82 MB/s

Not too bad for a single bus-powered drive. I can edit with Proxy instead of my ClipWrapped AVCHD media if it feels slow. This enclosure also has an option for for eSATA connection which I can do with my 2011 MBP. I will need to buy an extra $6 cable though that goes from the DC IN of the enclosure to the FW port of the laptop to power it since eSATA is not bus-powered. This should be a good solution until I can do it right and replace the optical drive.
--

Looking forward to Ben's benchmark tests on the internal SSD.

Thanks,
Dave