Should a Mac-User Upgrade to an Intel 520 SSD

[idata]

Hello All,

I have been contemplating putting the new Intel 520 series 240gb ssd into my early 2011 13" MacBook Pro. However, I do have some serious concerns and would really appreciate some advice.

I know that Apple can be very stubborn in supporting third party hardware where they are not benefiting financially. After reading a number of forums that have reported problems with Macs and Intel ssd's my main concerns are:

1. Getting the beep that tells me the ssd is incompatible.

2. That there is no tool box for OSX.

3. There is no trim support (Snow Leopard)

4. Getting the OSX to recognise the 6gb/s sata interface.

I would love to hear that all of these problems have been resolved and that I'm being paranoid about getting this new drive. Any comforting words or sound advice from people who have successfully installed and intel 520 series ssd into an early 2011 13" Macbook Pro (Snow Leopard) would be gratefully appreciated.

I plan on performing a clean install with the SSD rather than migrarting my existing software from my 5400rpm hdd.

Regards

Rodney Ferguson

Ps. Please do not suggest upgrading to Lion. Unfortunately, I find it truly awful.

[idata]

Hello costab and parsec,

Thank you very much for replying to my topic.

I can report that I took the plunge and bought an OEM 520 series 240GB SSD from Intel.

External Formating

In the event of any misfortune I decided to format and install OSX 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) as an external drive. Post-format size of the drive is a pleasing 239.7GB. After I installed and updated all of the software that I use together with a few large files the drive had around 150GB of free space left for future use.

Internal Install

My next step was to install it into my Macbook Pro 13", early 2011, 2.7GZ i7, 8GB ram model which was relatively painless other than having to find a Torx T6 screwdriver.

First Boot Up

After the first boot on the internal SATA interface everything started up as expected. Looking at the system information I could see that the link speed of 6gb/s had already been negotiated without any intervention from myself. However, trim support had not been enabled by the OS.

Read/Write Speeds

I then tested the read and write speed of the drive. Read speeds were around 480mbs and write speeds were a lot lower at around 280mbs.

Trim Support

After the test I enabled a thrid party trim support app which required a reboot. After the reboot, system info displayed that trim had now been turned on. However, this did not appear to have any immediate effect on the previous read and write speeds.

Impressions

Without a doubt my system feels a lot snappier with the 520 SSD over the spindle 70mbs Toshiba HDD. Large apps such as Logic Pro 9, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator open much quicker and feel very responsive. One area that has been significantly improved is the time it takes to save large graphics files in Illustrator. I probably edit around 50 files per day with each file taking around 30sec to save. The SSD saves these files in a flash, so its saving me time and helping to keep up my enthusiasm.

Longevity

Of course it is far to early to say how long the drive is going to last but I have set myself some 3 monthly reminders to add some quick updates on the drives performance over time. I'll probably post them on this thread.

Conclusions

At the current time I have to say that the upgrade has been relatively painless. Although I'm a little dissappointed with the write speed of the SSD at 280mbs. However, 280mb/s is still four times faster than my previous set-up with a drive that I managed to get for £275 (£1.14 per GB). So I'm very happy with it so far.

Thank you for the interest and allowing me to voice my concerns. Hope this helps others in choosing whether to use an SSD or not. Personally I would recommend it if you can get one for a good enough price.

Kind Regards

Rodney Ferguson

UK

Message was edited by: Rodney Ferguson

[idata]

Hello,

I have replaced my original 320 GB drive in MBP 13" early 2011 / OS X Lion with Intel 520 240GB just yesterday. So far flawless. I did a clean instalation and will move my files later on as needed with some cleanup to be done. No optibay dual drive setup, just pure replacement. TRIM enabled with trim enabler 2.0. Also I upgraded RAM from 4 to 8 GB, as I have seen in some situations the memory full and waking up from sleep times were becoming too long.

To the read/write speeds: If you are testing the speeds with blackmagic speed test (this is what most people use on Macs) it tests with incompressible data, where traditionally Sandforce controller drives (like Intel 520) are giving much lower than advertised speeds. In real world it does not mean anything wrong. If you have compressible data, like RAW photos, wave files or large text files for example, you can get better speeds than the measured 280. The reason is that Sandforce controlled drives are doing onthefly compression and therefore writing less data and hence becoming quicker (for data that is compressible). If you have already compressed data like MP3s, Divxs, JPEGs, PDFs, etc, it cannot use that advantage, so the 280 Mps speed is pretty good anyways. This is where most of the SSDs are despite of the advertised speeds, and the Intel 520 (at least 240 and 480GB options) is in the top rank there anyways. So this has nothing to do with TRIM. It also depends on many other aspects, but wanted to say, that it is nothing to worry about. I knew about that before I bought the disk and it behaves as expected. If you compare to Marvel controlled drives (like Intel 320 or Crucial M4) they give pretty much the same speeds, having slight advantage on the incompressible data and small data chunks (especially reads) and losing abit on the compressible data for writes in comparison to Sandforce.

Before release of Intel 520 I was not even thinking about Sandforce drive, as Sandforce has it's issues, but as Intel took 1+ year to adpot and test the technology and gives 5Y warranty on the drive I can say most of them you will not experience on I 520 and as it got even on price level with marvell drives, it won for me simply by the warranty.

Overall speedwise I got the very same results with Blackmagic> that is 480/280.

Also I recommend tomshardware and anandtech reviews of the drive, where in tomshardware review it's showed that the speeds on Macs are a bit lower than the drive itself is capable of, and Anandtech review mentiones one off the drawbacks of the drives with Sandforce controllers, and even if it is a rare case I think it should get attention: it's the situation, where you write incompressible data over and over to the disk, the speeds can go down dramatically and are irrecoverable even by TRIM. This is pointed to the nature of the Sandforce controller and the use of compression, though there is no firmware update from either Sandforce nor Intel available for this issue.

Hope this helps.

Sure if I will face any issues or will have recommendations I will post in this thread as I live with the drive.

cheers

mel.blanc

EDIT: I have applied some additional of the tweaks besides TRIM enabling to the system based on the following article:

http://poller.se/2010/08/optimizing-mac-os-x-for-ssd-drives/ http://poller.se/2010/08/optimizing-mac-os-x-for-ssd-drives/namely:- changed the sleep mode, so it does not write RAM to disk- disabled sudden motion sensor- disabled hard drive and computer sleep- enabled mounting with noatime option - so the file is not updated each time it is accessed (here I found articles, where also nodiratime should be enabled, or relatime should be used instead / see http://serverfault.com/questions/47466/drawbacks-of-mounting-a-filesystem-with-noatime http://serverfault.com/questions/47466/drawbacks-of-mounting-a-filesystem-with-noatime ) and decide yourself if it's really needed and useful. EDIT: nodiratime and relatime are linux only available, OS X does not have these inherited from unix. I will post here, if I have any findings or issues with the tweaks. mel

Message was edited by: mel.blanc

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I installed Intel 520 on my 2007 MacBoo Pro (Dual Core 2.16 Ghz, Model: 2.1), and did a clean installation of Lion. Worked very well for a week with noticable increase in speed. After that, system started to become unresponsive for upto 30 seconds. It then comes back and everything is OK. Frequency is once every 2-3 hours.

[idata]

Hey anoop,

It might be Lion that is the problem. I had exactly the same symptoms when I was running Lion from a spindle hard drive. Because of the freezes with Lion I went back to running snow leopard.

Do you have trim enabled on your SSD. You can do this with a third party trim enabler. But before you do this I recommend you go into disk utility and delete the free space on your SSD. However, I dont think that your system freezes are due to the SSD.

Good Luck

Rodders

[idata]

Hi Rodney. I have been using X-25 M G-2 80 gb intel ssd for two years without problem. I also used it with Macbook aliminum unibody. And there was no problem. I bought a Macbook pro early 2011 13 inch (same as yours) six months ago. I also used it with new Mac. It was flawless. I read lots of thing about intel ssds. Then I wanted to try the new 520 120 gb series. I bought it last week. First I recognized is: it can not delete lots of files at first time. It says that this file is in use. After doing a restart it deletes. On the contrary I have never experinced such a thing with my first ssd. Later I had lots of problems with my WD hard drive that is connected to airport extreme. It is impossible to go in to drive when it is online (I mean when it is connected to extreme) and time machine backups are full of problem. Than I got tired of dealing with these problems and changed the new ssd with the older one.

I am sure that all my problems are not related with Lion. When I changed the ssds, I did a clean install. But everytime I changed there were problems with intel 520 series. In two years time I haven't had any single problem with x-25 M G-2.

Now I am waiting a new firmware update. As far as I know 400i is the newest firmware for intel 520 series. As a result I don't recomment you to buy this ssd.