Diving into Solid State Disk
Now that second generation disks are coming out and the prices are getting reasonable (or with that of the 10,000 RPM disks) I thought it was time to give them a try.
I’m impressed:
- very fast – reads are frightening
- small – but it’s hard to find 2.5″ to 3.5″ mounting brackets
- cool – no heat this is great for cramped cases
- clean – no exposed circuits, unlike a regular hard disk
- quiet – obviously but very welcome
- would fit the Mac Mini very nicely
The unit I have is an OCZ Vertex 120GB, which is sufficient space for my purposes. I dropped it into my Franken Mac and ran XBench so I could get some performance numbers with a common base, please note that these numbers were taken after a fresh install so the disk has not yet been heavily fragmented. I would also note that this isn’t the Mac version of this drive, and as such I found the drive was very unstable with mysterious hangs and failures, but it did run long enough to get some good numbers. I now have the drive installed in a Gateway GT5676 as the primary boot disk for Fedora Core 11 and it has been rock solid and running vmware like a champ, but time will tell.
I found this article very helpful: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=736
Now the numbers:
OCZ Vertex
Results 180.94 System Info Xbench Version 1.3 System Version 10.5.6 (9G2030) Physical RAM 4096 MB Model Macmini3,1 Drive Type OCZ-VERTEX Disk Test 182.95 Sequential 136.65 Uncached Write 188.04 115.46 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 176.88 100.08 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 79.05 23.14 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 176.96 88.94 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 276.72 Uncached Write 112.99 11.96 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 307.32 98.38 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 1544.06 10.94 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 587.24 108.97 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Western Digital Velociraptor 10,000 RPM
Results 161.56 System Info Xbench Version 1.3 System Version 10.5.6 (9G2030) Physical RAM 4096 MB Model Macmini3,1 Drive Type WDC WD3000BLFS-01YBU0 Disk Test 93.41 Sequential 143.22 Uncached Write 190.65 117.06 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 163.74 92.64 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 81.75 23.92 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 230.15 115.67 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 69.31 Uncached Write 25.02 2.65 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 193.45 61.93 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 125.65 0.89 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 216.22 40.12 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Standard Mac 5400 RPM
Results 130.85 System Info Xbench Version 1.3 System Version 10.5.6 (9G2030) Physical RAM 4096 MB Model Macmini3,1 Drive Type FUJITSU MHZ2120BH G1 Disk Test 46.65 Sequential 64.41 Uncached Write 91.99 56.48 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 90.47 51.19 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 32.45 9.50 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 106.86 53.71 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 36.57 Uncached Write 13.38 1.42 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 92.49 29.61 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 67.95 0.48 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 109.77 20.37 MB/sec [256K blocks]