USB 3.0 Boot Disk

[Peterson50]

Just curious of how much latency there is in USB 3.0 enclosure with a ssd drive used as a boot disk. Has anyone tried this and is there a significant impact on CPU

Thanks

[chabig]

I don't understand your question. Latency is an issue particular to physical hard disks, not SSDs. Your Mac will boot just fine from a USB hard drive. I don't think you'll notice much difference between booting from that or your internal drive.

[Peterson50]

USB tends to require more cpu usage as opposed to other technologies that have onboard controller chips like firewire, thunderbolt etc. I was interested how much of an effect does using a usb 3.0 boot device on the cpu. I may not have expressed myself clearly.

[chabig]

I doubt you would notice any degradation, but I have not tried it. USB3 and SSD would negate some of the USB effects.

[Peterson50]

I've read one thread where under heavy load with usb 3.0 boot disk OSX may crash, just curious how many have tried this. Planning on getting a Thunderbolt Raid 0 Dual SSD, but for right now would be satisfied if I could be stable with booting with ssd in usb 3 enclosure.

[chabig]

The computer cannot crash because of the hard drive interface. Whoever wrote that didn't know what they were talking about. As proof, have you ever booted from a CD? Talk about slow...but no crash. More likely there was some kind of system corruption. I don't think there is any reason to doubt your reliability with an external SSD in a USB3 case.

[anthlover]

For starters knowing something about your system. What model of Mac, and year, etc. This would help just for example if you had USB3 to achieve the speed in question of the interface for SSD.

It is very unlikely to see any issues ever relating to the computer needing to be responsible for dealing with managing transfer versus interface.

Firewire was wonderful in its day but also can have severe issues with non oxford chipsets and that can cause issues. In a perfect world FW400 is around 25 percent faster then USB2, Firewire 800 is twice as fast as that and of course USB 3 is faster still.

[Peterson50]

Mac Mini 2012 with USB 3.0. i7 2.3

[onceagain]

Yeah....I was a firewrie adherent for a loooong time. Huge fan of FW800....but even I have seen the light and made the transition to USB3 for everything.

[anthlover]

So you have a nice mini. You will see no issues with using USB3.

USB 3 is very fast but not as fast an internal sata3 connection on machines from the last couple of years.

USB3 Generally 100 to 300mbs versus 500+mbs internally. Thunderbolt is a lot faster. I would say if one was to invest in a very fast SSD it might pay to get a thunderbolt case if they were going externally. For a regular HD, not worth thunderbolt. Alternately you could stripe two smaller SSDs together in two USB 3 enclosures and that would probably match a thurnderbolt or SATA3 connection to the extent you would get the full benefit of the speed of a single internal SSD.

Generally USB3 is plenty fast for virtually anything you might want to do. Most would probably rather put an SDD inside there systems. However I could totally see a late 2012 iMac 21 owner using USB 3 rather them disassembling their machine which is rather complicated compared to to other systems like your mini or macbook pro.

[Peterson50]

Decided on Lacie External Thunderbolt 240 SSD with Raid 0. Saw a price of $419 and had a $25 coupon also (Final $394). At that price I have a great enclosure when I decide to bump the drives up. the fan is loud but will disconnect it, not concerned with the SSD drives, if it was regular HD the heat would be an issue.

[anthlover]

That is an interesting choice. You could have easily put a single 500GB SSD inside your mini and gotten very good speed for the same price. Would have to look up reviews of your drive versus other 256 but the fastest SSDs hit close to 550mbs. Benchmarking drives depends a lot on the type of reading and writing.

I would not disable the fan, it was put there for a reason or would not have been included in the first place.

You could always return the drive if the noise bothers you.

I check reviews on Amazon and New egg, for quality/reliability. For speed testing there are many sites but I favor the one below

http://www.myce.com/review/

Note that your Lacie consists of two 128gb SSDs. Generally the 256 to 512GB SSD are the better choice they perform better even within the same model owing to the underlying ratio of read/write parts to Nand memory.

The choice you made for the external brought the price up quite a bit. Did you want to avoid replacing the internal in your mini? I believe if I am not mistaken there is even space inside for both. Some would could correct me on that point. Mini's are easy to work on compared to say an iMac. There are take apart videos that you can watch prior to deciding.

Some of the faster SSD are OCZ Vector and Vertex 4, Sumsung Pro 840. There are many good ones.

[anthlover]

Here are two different sets of instructions im sure you can find more for the internal drive install. I see it is moderate level of difficulty so you would have to watch the video and decide. Not sure if you have a late or early 2012, I think late.

http://eshop.macsales.com/installvid...mini2012_hd_h/

** Having reviewed another set of directions is a bit more work to install two SSD or two drives you have to buy an adapter and you have to take the system further apart. The work is not dissimilar two the attached video but it it is more involved.

I personally would just put one drive in its a faster install and plenty fast. The older HD can be saved as a spare back up of your data and could be used for something else at some point.

If your not backing up your data you should. Both to multiple separate physical disks using something like carbon copy cloner or super duper and an off site service like crash plan. Naturally if you have data on your current HD you would want to back it up first. One good option would be to buy an inexpensive USB 3 only case for a 2.5 inch drive for around $20 and clone using Carbon copy cloner or Superduper the Apple Internal to a new SSD before doing anything.

Then when you install the new SSD internal it will already have your system on it.

I did this with 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 and I am tickled pink with how fast it is. Now the even faster Vector is selling for the same $500, oddly. The 256GB sizes are around $250, give or take a bit. What happened price wise is the vector dropped about $100 after the holidays and the Vertex 4 went up about 60.

The Samsung Pro 840 is still about $540 in the 512Gb size.

I also want to say there is nothing wrong with the external use choose and If I had a 2012 Imac I might have considered something similar, just wanted you to be aware of what you can get for your money.

As an aside, I found this fairly early 2012 review of a very reasonable single drive sled for thunderbolt for $99
http://www.storagereview.com/thunder...d_drive_or_ssd

[Peterson50]

I'm not adverse to installing a drive in the mini, I did it on my old mini 1.83 ghz core 2 duo (which I still have) and older G4 mini. While this (2012) one has more squeezed into it, it is pretty straight forward, simply take my time. I was just tempted to try out a thunderbolt unit and couldn't pass up the price and really wanted an enclosure of sorts. I had a 240GB SSD that I was using in my macbook late 2008 that made it quite quick and was planning initially to put that in the mini, and then began toying with the idea of an external. I just received a few hrs of consulting from a client that covers the cost, so I'm not loosing anything.

But I appreciate the insight as $500 for a 512 OCZ is quite good bang for the buck. I've got so many drives lying around at this point figured I'd add another to the fray. What I would like to do at some point when Thunderbolt enclosures arrive in mass at really low price points is a enclosure for 4 drives and pop 4 512 OCZ SSDs in there, throw my vms on that thing and watch it fly.



Of course if I'm not satisfied, I will return the unit and get the OCZ and be done with it.

[anthlover]

SSD Really help with VMs especially importing them. Cuts them time down to a couple of minutes from more like 30 or more.

There are 4 Bay ones now. Drobo and Pegasus, of course there pricy.

Current Single SSDs are are pretty damn fast. I have seen some tests striping two together it does what we would think, its gets faster though some of them behave badly as an array.

You did get a pretty good deal. The only other alternatives are a Seagate sled and the Pegasus one that costs about what you paid bare. I believe the housing in your Little is the same but the newer 512GB version uses Sata 3 drives. I believe the enclosure itself is Sata 3 in both. Did yours come with the Thunderbolt cable? They finally started throwing it in the new one.

I happen to check on a related note. Seagate makes two other versions of Thunderbolt Drive adapter that come with a 2nd thunderbolt port for around $150. It is not as portable but some would like to have the extra thunderbolt port.

Glad it is working well for you.

[anthlover]

Some new things on the USB 3 front Two new enclosures that basically get very close to the speed of Thunderbolt if not equal it for now. These get up to the 400-450mbs range much better then the more typical 100-200mbs before for usb3. At the momnet only the Caldigit AV Pro is available.

http://barefeats.com/hard162.html Caldigit
http://barefeats.com/hard161.html Firmtek

[Peterson50]

I installed the LaCie unit, the one I got is not that noisy at all so I'm leaving the fan connected. I'm getting writes of 290 and reads of 493. The mini boots up extremely fast and I have an older Lacie hooked up to a Usb 3.0 to Sata adapter and the speeds are quite adequate for the VMs I run off these things.

[anthlover]

Glad the one you have now is not that noisy. It is nice system, particularly for the price you paid


It is good that there more options becoming available. I noticed too macsales has a new quad interface with USB3 (no thunder). Best I can tell from the one test i found for it only does 200mbs r/w. For me that with FW800 its good enough since my current macbook Pro 2010 is FW800 only.

Next one will be able to use Thunder or USB3.

The Caldigit and Firmtek units much faster 2x, but plenty fast for any HD but SSD and fast enough that it can be pressed to service.

I have actually decided that the data doubler from macsales is a very good option for non retina macbook pro and mini. Nice to have full Sata speed. And nice to have a mobile backup that travels with the macbook pro. Crashplan is mobile too but i like to have image based back ups in addition to file level. Having one that travels with macbook pro makes my back ups more frequent.