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Friday I finally got around to replacing the drive that died in my Macbook Pro. I decided to get the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive as the prices for 256GB SSD drives were just way too far outside my price range. That laptop has a full load of Creative Suite, Logic Studio, Final Cut Express, Office, iLife, iWork…pretty much everything, 120GB of just apps and OS.

The Momentus XT is a 500GB 7200rpm laptop drive with a 4GB Solid State Disk on board, that intelligently caches your most used apps. Instantly my Macbook Pro was a beast, loading apps like Photoshop in 4-5 seconds. The problem was that now my Macbook Pro was faster than my Mac Pro!

Even though I had just replaced the boot drive in my Mac Pro with a 500GB physical disk, I decided it was time to have a little fun with it.

The Mac Pro runs a much smaller load, the boot drive, when cleaned up was just a shade over 30GB. Given that a 40GB would be a tad too small, I decided 80GB was the number.

Which SSD For Me?

A quick search revealed that the Intel X25M 80 GB Solid State Drive was the top contender for price and performance so I started there. $200 wasn’t too unreasonable, so I did a little reading to make sure it was what I wanted and found something very interesting.

The Intel X25V 40 GB Solid State Drive, in a RAID 0 pair, is the same price with even better performance. Given that is way nerdier than only one drive, my fate was clear.

I picked up the drives, came home and realized I had to take a quick detour, the Mac Pro only had one HD power connector in the spare drive bay the second optical drive should fit in. Both the Intel drives came with a standard to SATA power connector however, so a quick solder job and I had a splitter cable.

Using the included SATA cables, I routed them to the two unused SATA connectors on the Mac Pro motherboard. That works out great because you have two SSDs in RAID and still have all 4 drive bays for traditional 3.5” disks, no waste!

I put it all back together, booted the Snow Leopard disc, created the array and started a restore from my OS drive to the new drive. It took 12 minutes to copy 31GB from a 7200rpm 3.5” disk to the array of SSDs.

Once done, I opened the select boot disk preference pane and switched my boot drive. The first time, it booted up in about 20 seconds.

I took a slight detour to do some jiggering with my physical drives also, so now all of my data is on a 2TB RAID 0 array also giving me slightly faster speeds.

A Quick RAID 0 Lesson

RAID 0 is not REALLY RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) in that it’s not at all Redundant. If one drive goes, the whole volume is toast. In my case I decided to have a slightly unusual strategy to deal with that. I used the old 500GB boot disk as a Time Machine backup of my operating system drive, and I have the entire 2TB disk backed up to Mozy, yikes!

The bottom line is that you do RAID 0 for speed, striping data across disks increases the bandwidth for writing and reading data. Make sure you have a backup plan in place to take care of a data loss.

The Results

The results are nothing short of stunning. After a disk repair, the computer boots in 15 seconds flat, all of my apps just open in seconds, I created this quick video to show how fast, this is Adobe Photoshop CS5 loading after a clean boot.

If you are watching the counter, that’s 3 seconds. Given that I am writing my data elsewhere, the relatively (for SSD) slow write speeds of the 40GB lower end disks just doesn’t come into play. I get tremendous read speeds and my Mac Pro is snappier than ever.

The process is pretty easy, and MacSales.com sells a great, although somewhat expensive, bracket to mount the drives correctly in your optical bay. If you know me, even though it’s not visible, you know I don’t like them just laying around in there.

It’s a quick and relatively inexpensive project that will take your Mac Pro from beast territory to total MONSTER.

For a more comprehensive review of benchmarks and performance against other SSD drives on the market, check out this article on TechReport.com.

I am not sure what the logic for labeling them “for 2009 Mac Pros” is, but after searching the entire depths of the internet, I finally found someone who had tried it, and not only found out that it works in an early 2008 Mac Pro, but it works perfectly beside the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XTs that came in those machines.

I have been wanting to expand the monitor selection on my Quad Mac Pro workstation but was having trouble finding a 2nd 2600 at a decent price. After seeing that the GT 120 was available on Apple.com (and in stock at the local store) for $150, vs. $299 for the older card most places I looked, I decided to look deeper.

The comments section on the store.apple.com page lists a few people that had tried it with success so figuring I could return it if I had problems, I picked one up.

I came home, shut down the machine, plugged in the card, booted it up and was in business. It’s worked flawlessly so far as a secondary card, and I am told it works fine as a main or only card as well.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC002ZM/A?n=graphic_cards&fnode=MTY1NDA5OQ&mco=MTA4MzU2MzE&s=topSellers

Enjoy!

So the cat is out of the bag. I have been telling the wifey to get ready for some plastic burn the day they drop new iMacs on us. I am ready to buy a new one “as soon as they announce quad-core iMacs” I said. So today the new iMacs are out and guess what, Apple has managed to close the gap between iMacs and the Mac Pro for sure, but they did it by making the Mac Pro much less appealing and by making only minor changes to the iMac. Let’s look at what they announced today:

Now, obviously I am out of luck on the Quad-Core iMac. That leaves me very little reason to upgrade my 2.13Ghz 24” iMac now doesn’t it.

It also makes me VERY happy that I bought my Mac Pro a few months ago. I purchased the $2,799 Dual 2.8Ghz Quad-Core Xeon model with 2GB of Ram and 320GB hard disk. Today, that leaves me quite a bit short on the new 8-Core model. If I drop $300 and go to the new base model, I lose a quad core CPU, some speed and 24GB of RAM capacity. WHOA! That’s quite a big drop!

So now the gap between the a $2,199 24” iMac and a $2,499 Mac Pro and if you cancel out the upgrade slots, upgrading for $300 gets you a better processor, 1GB LESS Ram and you lose a 24” Monitor. That’s not a very compelling upgrade story if you ask me.

Now I realize that Mac Pros and iMacs have completely different audiences, or do they? I have both. I have the big Mac Pro for all of my recording studio needs, but my daily driver is a 24” iMac. Was it really beneficial to water down the Mac Pro line instead of giving the iMac enough power to be a contender with games and graphics apps?

The last and biggest complaint with all of the Apple offerings is that they really seem to have no clue what a current video card is. The nVidia GeForce GT 120 is the rebranded 9500GT which retail for around $50-60 and the nVidia GeForce GT 130 is the rebranded 9600 GSO that bring around $80-100 retail. Of course we all know that Apple would never pay retail, so let’s say that on the far end that they pay 80% of retail (which is VERY high) then that $2,499 computer is sporting a video card that’s probably worth $40. Sheesh. And this is considered a GRAPHICS WORKSTATION right? $2,500 gets me a bargain video card?

The iMac suffers from the same thing, but I consider it a bit worse. The unfortunate Apple customer that really is into gaming, get’s the top of the Apple consumer line get’s at best a $65 graphics card for their $2,200.

Where oh where is the “Mac,” the Quad-core capable mid-sized desktop with moderate expansion. Give us a single PCI-X slot, max it at 4-8GB of Ram, 500GB or so of stock hard drive with a single bay for expansion, and a full compliment of FireWire and USB2. Price it starting around $999 with a dual-core CPU and max it around $1,999 with with a Quad, a hefty helping of RAM and a smoking video card. You still get your glorious profit margin. Something is telling me that if HP is selling a 2.6Ghz Core 2 Quad with 4GB of RAM, a 750GB HD and a 768MB nVidia GeForce 9600GS for $1,159, Apple could squeeze out something similar for $1,999.

Apple has got great design skills, they are sharp at making operating systems, they just seem to really be sliding lately on choosing the actual components that make up their PCs.