So, it’s been about 6 months with an 80Gb X25-M, and it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
Random reads are very, very fast. It really doesn’t care about fragmentation; apps start up pretty instantly. For developers with a large working set (with all the code intellisense guff in Eclipse et al) it’s a significant benefit. You loose a lot of the ‘oh my god what IS it DOING I’m going to THROW this machine out the WINDOW’ moments. I STILL wish Eclipse had a clue about FSEvents, but you can’t have everything. It’s surprising how slow going back to a spinning platter feels when launching apps.
Now the bad news. Proviso: The way I use a disk might not be typical for an end user, but is probably pretty typical for a Java developer. It’s plugged into my 2008 Mac Pro, on which I do a lot of building of a reasonably big application, which constitutes a maven build (or an eclipse background compiling). So a lot of .class files and .jar files will be created and deleted every day. I do however leave a fair proportion (~20%) of the disk unused to try and give some headroom for defragmentation.
Now, this may be the worst case scenario for an SSD, but I’ve noted a couple of blog posts of late about slowdowns on heavily-used X25-Ms (e.g SSD Reconditioning requiring HDDErase (or equivalent) in order to coax them back into their original performance. For me, I don’t know if it’s the combination of heavy dev work, or an installation of Snow Leopard over an old install causing excess fragmentation, but my machine had slowed to an utter utter crawl, locking up in several places under load.
Some observations:
* HFS+ totally sucks, and needs to Die. There’s a build plugin that I use which creates many temporary files in /tmp, and when it cycles through deleting them on completion, I/O effectively locks solid. This is really poor. Something’s rotten in the state of OS X I/O; VMWare also seems to be able to bring the system to its knees.
* the X25-M is hardly painless for Mac users, you need a PC to hand to upgrade the firmware (if you happen to have an NVidia graphics card?!?) or to run HDDErase to refresh it (oh, using v3.3, not 3.1 or 4.0, and on a PC with a specific BIOS… FFS!). I can cope with a “deep clean” cycle once in a while for the benefits, but it’s a PITA to have to get the screwdrivers out in order to do it.
* Carbon Copy Cloner is your friend.
* TRIM is supposed to help (if the OS actually supported it). But Intel says no TRIM for G1 owners (Well, actually, Intel officially says _nothing_ – they must be learning from Apple) – fair enough, but it’d be Kudos to them to support the early adopters. If the firmware just won’t fit in the available flash space (!) or whatever, then just say so.
* There’s a lack of a decent, mac, free, HDD performance tool. XBench isn’t accurate. Someone should bring IOMeter into the one-click generation.
So – a qualified thumbs-up, a bit more so for business expenditure, a bit less so for personal expenditure.
