SSD + HD = The best of both worlds?
Friday, June 17, 2011 at 9:27AM 
It had to be done. My computer felt slow despite the fact that my desktop computer was an overpowered Mac Pro from 2 years ago stuffed with too many cores and too much RAM for the work I do on it. My MacBook Air, iPad and even iPhone felt so much more fluid for day-to-day use than the Mac Pro despite all of them having much less computational horsepower. Sure the Mac Pro was a beast when I was encoding video or building a Keynote presentation full of large assets, but booting, launching apps or even switching between tasks was noticeably slower than even my iPhone.
The Mac Pro was held back by a mechanical hard drive. Every other device I use had an SSD, and I was spoiled. Only the Mac Pro had to wait for a little part to move and search across a spinning disk to find information. I'd held out though for capacity. My data set won't fit on any contemporary SSD. My solution has been to keep my working data on Dropbox, and use my Mac Pro for archival storage. I have a pretty extensive Backup/replication strategy (Most data replicated across two computers and Dropbox, both computers backing up to Time Machine, both computers backing up to Crashplan).
Then Apple released new iMacs and several points caught my eye. First was quad-core i7 option at 3.4 GHz. The next was a 2GB Radeon 6970M. Finally was the option to get a 256 GB SSD with a 2 TB HD. I decided to get the iMac and move my home directory to the HD while keeping the OS and applications on the SSD. Then to boost speed a little more, I symlinked some directories back to the SSD from my home directory (~/Application Support, ~/Caches, etc.).
The end result is the most responsive computing device I've ever used. Day-to-day tasks are fast and responsive, but there is still ample CPU for more demanding tasks when needed. The speed, capacity and massive display make my other devices seem like compromises necessary for mobility–and I'm finally using my Macs more than my iPad again.
Ah, progress.
Reader Comments (7)
I am about to get my iMac with SSD+Hard disk and am curious how you do the "symlink" you mention. Do you have a link to a guide on this?
Those SSDs are nice ... a SSD RAID 5 .. or maybe RAID 0 would be killer.
There are two things that trouble me about Apple.
1) They seem to have gone insane for reflective displays. These are horrible displays, unless you need a make shift mirror to get ready in the morning. I really can not stress this enough. They do (not just Apple) compensate somewhat with massive amounts of brightness - but this only goes so far. I doubt I would ever by an iMac with the screen built the way it is - unless I can get a matt finish.
2) .... and slightly off topic ... What would be really nice is if Apple used some of their $70B to re-introduce real server (data center) hardware. You know, rack mountable 1U servers and arrays ... maybe even blades and god forbid some virtualization. I guess the fact that iOS is a success means Mac OS X (server) withers and dies? Kind of ironic considering they are putting billions in these data centers across the globe ... and probably using Solaris or something else (in house OS?) for it.
This article tells how to make the symlinks.
<http://gigaom.com/apple/how-to-replace-your-macbooks-optical-drive-with-an-ssd/>
Look for the link to "create a symlink."
Now the $1 question: is your data backed up?
SSDs have no recovery track record.
Hard drives in the imacs are proprietary. That is , they have unique thermal sensors and try finding a cheaper (3rd party) replacement drive when they fail (out of warranty).
I'd make sure not to depend too much on time machine (a good start ) and have another "mirrored" array for scripted image clone of drives.
It baffles me as why someone would think an iMac is a replacement for a Mac Pro unless this person really was wasting all that computing power (no iMac can achieve regardless) and needed the tower's space.
Did you know you can put a SSD in the Mac Pro? you would have achieved the same results -or better- by upgrading your slow mechanical drive. I did that by adding an OWC SSD and my two year old Mac Pro smokes my friends brand new iMac + SSD that happens to match the configuration of your new rig. Benched side by side with identical conditions using real world tests to be as fair as possible. The only thing the iMac had better than my Mac Pro was the video card... but again I can still upgrade that if I want to. Oh and that screen is a real eye popper... that I can purchase separately also from Apple.
Still a matter of personal taste I suppose, enjoy your new Mac though.
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