OCZ Vertex SSD in a 17″ Santa Rosa MacBook Pro

My Reasons for Buying an SSD

I do all of my work on a MacBook Pro. It is a maxed out 17″ of the Santa Rosa variety – this one with the 2.4 Ghz CPU, 4GB RAM, and the higher res display. It was top of the line when purchased and still has pretty solid specs.

Lately I have been noticing it beach balling a lot, along with very frequent full-bore fan speed and noise. Additionally my IO read/write indicators (via menumeters) are constantly lit up. When I first got this laptop I do not remember any of that – it ran very silent and I barely ever noticed lag or stuttering.

I had originally thought this machine had the 7200rpm 160GB drive of the mid ‘07 revision but despite threads like this one confusing things, I am pretty sure the disk was actually the 5400rpm. The xbench comparison pages revealed that the disk tests were coming back with an aggregate score of high 30’s to low 40’s for people running Santa Rosas with the 5400 rpm drive and as you can see in the below benchmarks mine wasn’t even on par with those scores. As far as I could tell from Xbench I was running a 4200 rpm drive or a 5400 rpm drive that was dying with a score in the 20’s

My frustration with the Macbook’s performance happened to correspond in timing with a lot of discussion at the office about our production database IO performance, SAS drives, better controllers, etc. This turned into conversation about Solid State Disks (SSDs), the Intel X25s, and even the incredible Fusion-IO drives. For anyone interested the X25-E and Fusion-IO are compared here.

So I made up my mind to buy an SSD for this Macbook Pro. A tax return was coming, it was close to my birthday, so why not right? I had my mind set on the Intel X25-M 80GB and then Zach pointed me at this incredibly detailed review/overview of SSDs by AnandTech.com. That article is excellent and you should read it if in the market for an SSD. The big takeaways are:

• Random IO plays a huge part in the performance of a computer under a typical work day load. Sequential IO (the speed advertised on the box) is far less important.
• Many SSDs, notably all using a JMicron controller, have horrible random write performance – so bad that they are actually a step down from a standard disk.
• Intel’s SSDs do not suffer from this issue and they perform the best of all SSDs available.
• OCZ has made a few of the JMicron-based SSDs that have the terrible random write performance but their newest SSDs, including the OCZ Vertex, do not suffer from this issue and they perform well.
• SSDs get slower once you have written to all available space at least once, but are still far faster than a standard disk once this happens.

The main gist is that an SSD is a very noticeable, solid upgrade. The OCZ Vertex does not perform quite as well as the Intel X25s (wins some, but loses more benchmarks in that AnandTech article) but you pay significantly less per GB. The Intel X25-M 80GB was about the same price as the OCZ Vertex 120GB (low $300s) when I made my purchase. The baseline jump from regular HD to SSD is huge so the incremental difference on top of that between the Vertex and the X25-M just didn’t seem like a big deal.

Preparation

To prepare for the OCZ Vertex I shrunk down my disk space usage. I was using 100GB and my initial direction towards the Intel disk meant I had to lose a significant portion of that. The OCZ eliminated this need but from their forums and the above AnandTech article leaving space empty is a good idea as it delays the point at which you have written over the entire drive.

I used a combination of Monolingual and Disk inventory X to achieve this. The first can delete languages and architectures you don’t care about – for me it freed up 4.2GB of space. The second provides a very useful visual display of your hard drive and makes it easy to identify and eliminate the big space killers. I found an unused parallels image, old irrelevant zip archives, unused applications and their data/caches (an old version of IntelliJ IDEA had a 3GB cache on disk, and a long ago uninstalled copy of MS Office left a couple GB as well). Unless you care about the speech capabilities of your laptop, you can also kill the Alex voice at /System/Library/Speech/Voices/Alex.SpeechVoice to net another ~700MB.

In total I got my usage down to 63GB and that includes 26GB of music I could offload to something else if I felt like it. Can’t recommend those two programs enough.

Installation

Despite being very comfortable swapping out computer hardware I was initially hesitant to do the install myself. This is because these particular MBPs are nontrivial to swap the hard drive of. But, after being told by Amro that it wasn’t too bad and also really wanting to get the swap done I drove to Home Depot, bought a Torx screwdriver set (T6 is what you need along with a tiny phillips) and did end up putting the drive in myself. It took me ~40 minutes but I was working slowly and carefully to ensure I didn’t jack anything up. I printed up the PDF of these instructions and they were complete and clear. My notes from this process:

• In Step 10, the ribbon cable was taped down pretty good. I’d recommend loosening the tape and disconnecting the cable with tape still attached if you can.
• In Step 15 the SATA connector had a couple pieces of tape around it that wrapped up underneath the drive.
• I used a cheap 2.5″ disk enclosure and SuperDuper to copy my existing drive to the OCZ after formatting it with Disk Utility. This worked flawlessly. After the copy I just swapped the drives, turned on my machine, and I was at 100% again – everything exactly as it was.
• Go slow and keep track of the screws you remove by clearly labeling them on a sheet of paper. You have to remove (and replace) about 30 screws.
• From reading around, and ignore this, the process doesn’t void your warranty (again, what I have read, not what I am saying). But, if you take your laptop to the Apple store and they see a non-spec hard drive or any damage they can refuse to do work on it so be prepared to put your old drive back if you need to get it serviced and be very careful so there isn’t any way for them to tell you were in the case. If you are not comfortable doing it yourself, I’d suggest Atlanta Pro Audio – reasonable price and they can do it while you wait. They were recommended and used by multiple coworkers.

Here’s a shot of the laptop guts with it all opened up, also the point where it is too late to turn back.

Now on to the actual numbers and whole reason for this post.

Performance Notes

• The data on my hard drive was unchanged between non-SSD and SSD tests – exact same content.
• In the “launch apps” tests below I am loading my minimal stack of daily use applications – IntelliJ IDEA, Textmate, Terminal, TaskPaper, Mail, iCal, PostgreSQL 8.3 server, Firefox, Tweetdeck, Adium, iTunes, and two Fluid apps.
• I launched the applications via Spotlight in the same order as quickly as lag/Spotlight allowed. Then checked on the biggest apps until fully working. IntelliJ IDEA dominates this time as it by far takes the longest to fully load (it loads up with our huge Java project setup by default). The timing is highly subjective, but this is the period of time that passed between login and when I felt all applications were responsive and usable.
• Xbench is available at Xbench.com. You can view posted results from other people there too. My Xbench runs were done after a clean reboot and with nothing else running.
• I had planned to do dd and bonnie++ tests as well – actually did run them on the old drive but after reading the OCZ forums and considering that I had to write a total of 16 GB to disk to run those tests to get real results I decided it wasn’t worth chewing on the SSD just for a benchmark. Once the SSD has proven stable for a longer period of time i’ll run those tests to compare. For now I just have Xbench. I don’t know if it is accurate at all (compared to dd/bonnie++) but it is commonly used and provides a way to do comparison. I got different results with Xbench on every single run, used middle of the pack runs for numbers below..

Performance Before SSD Install

Bootup results
Time to boot up to login screen: 83 seconds
Time to login and launch all apps: 526 seconds

Xbench results
Total system score (all tests): 99.01
Link to all pre-SSD results

The disk-specific numbers:

Performance After SSD Install

Bootup results
Time to boot up to login screen: 24 seconds
Time to login and launch all apps: 64 seconds (WOW – compare to above)

Xbench results
Total system score (all tests): 185.23
Link to all results

The disk-specific numbers:

In addition to an utterly amazing performance increase my laptop is completely silent now. As I type this post I can hear absolutely nothing. Without menumeters telling me when reads/writes are happening I would never know the disk was doing work.

Conclusion

The OCZ Vertex makes this laptop an entirely new machine. It makes a HUGE difference. Best money I have ever spent on a computer upgrade. These things, in my opinion, are the biggest advance in computing hardware to come along in quite awhile. And over the next few years they will get faster, bigger, and cheaper. Prices have literally dropped in half in just the last few months so if you aren’t in dire need of a new disk it is probably best to wait longer.

The biggest, most noticeable part of running with the SSD installed is boot time and application launch/quit time. Applications load instantly. I used to open up the Applications folder in Finder when I rebooted because Spotlight would lag and that way I could start all my apps from one place (I don’t keep anything in the dock – only shows running programs). With the SSD, Spotlight is functional immediately and when I tried to start everything from the Finder I could not because the Apps fired up so dang fast I could not keep my cursor in the Finder window.

I have only been running with the SSD in for one day so that is the context this post is written in. There are scary posts in the OCZ forums of people (including several OSX users) having really rough issues with this SSD in – freezes, data corruption, etc. Notably it appears people have increased difficulty with sleeping their machines, using Bootcamp, or running Windows VMs. I don’t use Bootcamp but can say I have had zero issues with sleeping/waking or running Windows VMs in Parallels (the VMs load wickedly fast now). And to their credit the OCZ guys are tenacious in response, appear to be completely willing to assist and replace, and definitely seem to be standing by their drives. I suspect it is a minority of users having issues but just take it as a warning. Reading those forums for awhile made me really nervous about my purchase (and was a contributing factor to swapping the drive myself – so I can get it out if need be). I do thorough backups – hopefully I won’t need them. After using the laptop for a full day with my normal, heavy load I feel a lot better about it being stable.

Also, the OCZ forums include a lot of people tuning their partitions, flashing various firmware versions, and tweaking settings heavily to get more performance. I intentionally did none of that. I just copied my stuff to the drive and swapped it in so take this as a naive but straight forward and realistic install. My OCZ Vertex is running firmware 1199. There is a newer version out but as far as I can tell you need a PC to update it. I’ll only worry about that if I have issues.

So overall – very happy. My laptop is a lot faster. Biggest upgrade (by feel) I can ever remember doing to a computer. Today was the first day in a long time where I had virtually no hesitation or beach balling from the MBP.