SSD in Early 2009 Mac Pro Tower

[mdamour]

Howdy all... first time posting...

I'm running Snow Leopard on an Early 2009 Mac Pro Tower - 2.26 (8) Core Xeon machine with 16GB of RAM. I was looking to boost overall performance by moving my boot drive to an SSD.

Other than the OWC stuff which looks like it will work, I was wondering of anyone who had luck installing an SSD into a Mac Pro... which brand you went with... if it's noticeably faster around the OS... and finally if you had any pointers or anything I need to be aware of before upgrading...

Thanks in advance for the suggestions.

 

[shogun2010]

I dropped a couple of Vertex 2 drives into my mid-2010 Mac Pro - one for the OS and one for virtual machines. It does make the whole machine "feel" much faster. Applications launch very quickly. The SSD removed the big slowdown when doing disk I/O with my virtual machines.

If your current OS boot drive will fit completely onto the SSD, just use SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old HD to the new SSD. I used SuperDuper! and it worked without hiccups.

 

[mdamour]

Thanks Shogun2010... the Mac Pro had no problem seeing the drive or initializing it etc?

 

[Celeryman]

We have a 2009 Mac Pro at work that has been running strong for a couple years now on a 120GB G.Skill Falcon (First Gen). It does speed the machine up considerably. And it was running on the 1570 firmware (I think that was the number) up until a couple weeks ago when I pulled it out and flashed it to the latest... 2030 I believe. Works great!

 

[shogun2010]

md: No issues at all. Pop in the SSD, use Disk Utility to partition and format it. Use whatever suits your fancy to clone your boot drive to it and then enjoy!