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G2, G3, 510 or Vertex 2/3 in Macbook Pro

S

spooky69

Junior Member
I can find a G2 160Gb that works out to £1.25/Gb and a Vertex 2 240Gb that works out to £1.31/Gb. Obviously far cheaper than the 510 and the Vertex 3 (once it becomes available). No idea yet on what price and capacity the G3 will have if it does actually become available.

So, on a 2010 i7 Macbook Pro, would I notice a real-world difference between the 510 and the G2? I am assuming that the G3 will be similar to the G2.

Would there be a real-world and noticeable difference between the Vertex 2 and the G2 or the 510 on my machine?

I realise that I am restricted to SATA II but wondered if the newer drives would provide a noticeable difference in speed or if it is better to get an older drive for less money.

I use my machine for the usual stuff along with CS5 for image and web work and some video encoding.
 
I'm seeing the 300GB G3 listed on a supplier site at £575 - if that turns out to be true then I can't see the point in this product.
 
steer clear of sandforce with macbook's. they tend to rear the ugly side of the sleep bugs.

indilinx = great
intel = great
samsung,toshiba = great
sandforce = meh

so why choose meh?
 
Disagree entirely with Emulex. The question that needs to be asked is that of which drive is best in a non-TRIM environment and why. As well, the V3 does nothing to help as your system isn't a SATA 3 system.

Sandforce has proven through the success we are seeing with the Revo series that their drives can sustain themselves and maintain performance over a long period of time without TRIM. The reasoning for this is the aggressive ITGC (garbage collection) in use with SF drives IMHO.

Actually....do we know of any Mac users that can speak of their use of an Intel drive in a Macbook for an extended period of time.
 
Vertex 3 is stronger in sata2 sytems as well with doubled read speeds and better small randoms. Is a better drive primarily due to the MUCH improved ruductions in throttling, IMHO.

And yes, while Sandforce drives do not return to fresh speeds once throttled to the normal "settled state" speeds, they do maintain consistency due to recovery through GC. GC is known to be slower on Sabdforce though and just need a bit of idle time after heavy write sessions.
 
Having used G2 160GB in macbook (late 2008 aluminum) for last year, and recently purchased and been using a vertex 3 240GB in my new 2011 2.3 17" macbook pro, I would highly highly recommend the G2 for anyone with a SATA II interface. Absolutely no issues with it ever, and now you will likely have the new firmware installed so will not have to update the G2 upon install.

The upgrade in speed from non-SSD to SSD is by far the largest improvement in day-to-day use that I have experienced in the last 10 years. By comparison, the move from Macbook w/G2 to Macbook Pro w/Vertex 3 was unnoticeable, in everything, and I do mean everything except in heavy video rendering (why I bought it) and gaming (due to dGPU).

As for tweaks, I disable the sudden motion sensor and hard drive sleeping.
 
As drives have saturated SATA2 for a while now, you'll see zero performance difference between these drives.

If you are thinking of going SATA3 at one point, I'd suggest getting the 510 or V3.
 
flamenko said:
Disagree entirely with Emulex. The question that needs to be asked is that of which drive is best in a non-TRIM environment and why.
Click to expand...
I'd think the first and foremost issue is "Does the drive work flawlessly in the laptop" before thinking about performance - especially since the difference between all modern drives is mostly noticeable in benchmarks anyhow.

SF has/had a lot of problems with macs so far and although 1.32 should've helped I personally would think twice about it - or at least check if the FW remedies the problems for that specific mac (there are other forums with a larger group of users who could help with that)
 
flamenko said:
Disagree entirely with Emulex. The question that needs to be asked is that of which drive is best in a non-TRIM environment and why. As well, the V3 does nothing to help as your system isn't a SATA 3 system.

Sandforce has proven through the success we are seeing with the Revo series that their drives can sustain themselves and maintain performance over a long period of time without TRIM. The reasoning for this is the aggressive ITGC (garbage collection) in use with SF drives IMHO.

Actually....do we know of any Mac users that can speak of their use of an Intel drive in a Macbook for an extended period of time.
Click to expand...

I have built 2 Windows XP machines using OCZ Agility II drives within the last 9 months. I don't have numerical evidence, but both systems are not as fast as they were when new - there is a noticeable slow down. I have also built a few Windows XP machines with Intel SSDs, and they have maintained their "quickness" over time, using the SSD toolbox once a week to perform a manual TRIM (I think that's what it does).

So I'm not convinced about the garbage collection on non-TRIM systems. I can only recommend an Intel SSD for Windows XP, just for the SSD Toolbox utility.
 
kmmatney said:
I have built 2 Windows XP machines using OCZ Agility II drives within the last 9 months. I don't have numerical evidence, but both systems are not as fast as they were when new - there is a noticeable slow down. I have also built a few Windows XP machines with Intel SSDs, and they have maintained their "quickness" over time, using the SSD toolbox once a week to perform a manual TRIM (I think that's what it does).

So I'm not convinced about the garbage collection on non-TRIM systems. I can only recommend an Intel SSD for Windows XP, just for the SSD Toolbox utility.
Click to expand...

I have used SF based drives in non-trimmed environments from day 1 as have many of my friends and many other forum members that I've seen. Problem with SF based drives is that most don't realize the complexity or that the controller has built in throttling algorithms actually designed to slow the drive down once the controller's map is fully formed and Durawrite kicks in.

The other thing most aren't aware of is that the SF controller has very slow GC and requires additional logged off idle time for it to work efficiently. Power options must also be set to never let the hard drive shut down to keep from limiting its available time to do so. Using XP as a rule to form that opinion would be similar to saying that any other non-trimmed implementation such as raid or Revo/IBIS could not maintain speeds due to loss of that function.

Even if you had trim availability on XP it would do nothing to regain speed as Durawrite has the final say and only enhances stamina by increasing the fresh block pools size and prevents worst case throttles which are called "hammered state throttles".

So if you want to fix that SF drives issues it can be done fairly easily(well most of it) by visiting the mfgrs forum to figure out how to do it. Or if you started your own thread I could lay out the foundation and walk you through the steps on this forum if preferred. Important thing to know is that it can be fixed if you are perceiving slowdowns.
 
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