Is the Solid State Drive worth $600 in a new IMAC ?

T

Tim Kay

Well-known member
Hi guys, been reading through the fourm, trying to do research on what to get for my next editing system. So far really like the Imac ( was editing on a '10 MBP which just got stolen) so now i'm back in the research game.

Here's some cool facts I learned about SSD from talking with Intel Engineers at a conference. SSD avg. life span is 10yrs, while spinning drives last 4 years. Read time is something like 40x faster, but write time is equal to spinning drives.

So does all this add up to a better CS5 & FCP experience ? It's the most expensive upgrade and want to know how much value I'll get out of it. User experiences would be helpful.

Thanks for your help
 
Another option is a hybrid drive. You can get a 500G for $150 or so and they're about 40% faster than a 7200 RPM hard drive and really close to an SSD speed but for way cheaper. I'm considering one for my OS drive.
 
SSDs are awesome. It's probably the second best upgrade you can do next to a graphics card (with regards to a speed increase on an existing machine).

Tim Kay said:
Here's some cool facts I learned about SSD from talking with Intel Engineers at a conference. SSD avg. life span is 10yrs, while spinning drives last 4 years. Read time is something like 40x faster, but write time is equal to spinning drives.
Click to expand...

4 years? Most of my drives are over 4 years old. Damn, I think I have one here that's 10 years old and it still runs like a bomb (although IDE is slow). Shows you that they'll do anything to sell you a product.

The malfunction rate is a lot higher with SSDs as they are still an emerging technology. At one stage something like 1/3 SSDs were duds.
 
Okay, Drives do last much longer then 4 years. If you where doing loads of work on it... then I could imagine this kinda life span.
The SSDs are the 2nd best Upgrade for any computer.
They are really expensive though, so the next best solution and frankly... The new industry of expansion are these Hybrid drives.
They are a little faster then a standard hard drive, but not as fast as an SSD.
The other great and affordable solution is to have a strip raid internally for your iMac.
You can remove your optical DVD drive and replace it with another hard drive. (There are kits that make this possible)
After that, people get 2 SSDs, or use 1 to run programs and another standard HD for strorage.

SSDs wont help you too much with videos, they are designed for running programs and booting times. Sure video will run a little faster, but for the price, its not a valuable investment.
I would seriously look into a SSD boot drive, then getting a Thunderbolt raid drive for your storage and editing needs.

SSD for booting and running programs, Normal or Hybrid drives for editing, and ONLY normal HDs for storage.
 
daihard said:
Okay, Drives do last much longer then 4 years. If you where doing loads of work on it... then I could imagine this kinda life span.
Click to expand...

Any amount of work you're doing on that drive wont push it to die in 4 years. Maybe a file server, with 24/7 read/writes.

Yeah, SSDs are for programs and booting times. SSD = Win7 boots fully loaded in 10 seconds. Premiere opens in 2.
 
Thanks so far for the feedback. The intel guys were actually really cool. They are the ones in lab coats that actually build the chips. I'm sure they last longer,but probably when they are past the bell of the curve in life. Regarding SSD, I'm really leaning towards it. Especially since you cant upgrade later. So lets say in after effects, while rendering will be the same, if the source video lives on the ssd (but is written to a spinning drive), in theory this should be faster . Also moving along the timeline too? So basically a faster work flow except when writing.
 
Last edited:
I put an Intel 320 SSD (250GB) in my 17 MacBookPro. I will NEVER go back to HDD. It's THAT good. That said, if you edit LOTS AND LOTS of video, the cost for the SSD might outweigh the benefit, and the small sizes. I'd consider a thunderbolt raid if I was editing large files a lot.

Luckily, I do a lot of VFX work, so I don't need a lot of files on my machine at once for that, so I can get by with a smaller drive.
 
I built an editing machine almost two years ago and had a 32 GB SSD as the boot drive and a 1 TB as the main storage. CRAZY fast. I have since gone to FCP on a Macbook pro, but I fully believe that the other machine was (and would still be, I took out the SSD and gave the computer to my parents for their home computer. A bit overkill, but they like the speed, haha) faster than my Macbook pro.

That being said, I have a 32 GB SSD just sitting in my basement that I would be willing to get rid of really cheap if anyone wants to play with it. It is actually practically new (I had it replaced accidentally. Long story short the computer started messing up and I assumed it was the SSD given their history. I got a replacement and it did the same thing. Turns out the hard disk controller on the motherboard was bad. Replaced the mother board and the computer works perfectly. Then I gave it to my parents. The SSD may have 2 hours use on it, total.)
 
but back to the point of the thread (I got a bit off-topic):

I would definitely recommend going for a SSD, even if it is just for a boot or scratch drive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top