Is having an SSD as your boot drive worth the added expense?

Luis Caffesse

Luis Caffesse

Admin
I'm in the market for a new system here soon, and one of the decisions I'm debating is whether or not to use an SSD as my boot drive.

I don't really know what the day to day benefits are, so I'm having a hard time deciding if it's worth the added expense. I'm talking about a desktop system here, not a laptop, so any energy efficiency issues are somewhat moot. I'm more interested in speed.

I realize it will speed my bootup times. But will I notice any real difference in the speed of my system when actually working in FCP (or Color, motion, etc)?

I asssume as long as there are bottlenecks elsewhere in the system then the SSD won't make that significant of a difference? For example - if my footage is on an internal eSata drive, will my boot drive being an SSD matter at all in terms of performance?

Thanks for any insight.
 
Here's the scoop Luis.

I bought a Crucial 128 GB SSD drive last year and installed it on a MacBookPro 13" 2009.

I benched 210/166 GB/s write read, and the dang thing literally booted in five seconds. Launching apps were fabulously quick, almost instantaneous.

Loved it.

Then I used is on our early 2009 MacPro desktop as a boot drive, and that's where I was disappointed. Boot times were about 45 seconds, much slower than laptop, and I don't know why.

I still believe that launch times for the apps did speed up, but not enough to consider it as a value for the $400 I spent.

Hope this helps.
 
Well that's odd...but it does help.

Did you notice any difference on the laptop when actually editing? or was is simply on the bootup and launch of apps?

I imagine trasfer of data might speed up a bit - but it would still be only as fast as the slowest device, right? Meaning - if I'm transfering data from a FW800 drive to an SSD (or vice versa), it's only going to move as quickly as the FW800 allows.
 
Alright - well that probably just made my decision.
Doesn't sound like that would be the best place to spend my money right now.

Thanks for the info, David.
Much appreciated.
 
Actually turns out there is a big difference between ssd drives. The best are ocx and owc drives as they have built in parity. Also from my research small files do wreak havoc with the drives speed and reliability. Guess that isn't a problem with the ocx and owc ssd drives. Look at barefeats.com
 
I don't believe OWC makes its own, but perhaps it does.

My testing was based on boot times using identical OS X installs on a MBP versus MP.

I couldn't find a reason why the MBP would boot in 4 seconds, and the MP took abou 45 seconds.
 
What about heat? Do the SSD drives cause any dramatic improvement in the temp of the laptop? Or durability?
 
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