Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler SSD as boot drive question

Moving small file I/O off of the SSD completely obviates buying an SSD. That's what they're GOOD at.

Those all seem like good tips for when the post was written - 4 years ago. They're not so much now, aside from the defragging one.

I've 'updated' my old Mac Mini 2GHz Core 2 Duo 8GB DDR to an Intel SSD. Boot time is VASTLY improved and Aperture performance is great. I would've gone the Samsung route but the Black Friday deal was too good to pass up.

Hmm.... Interesting because I've been told by at least 6 different people in 3 different discussion groups that it is still good to offload this stuff. That was all within the last 8 days, this would make about 50% more people in this one thread saying otherwise.

You guys are pretty smart though.

My resume says I work in storage. Of course, on the scale that I work with, having a single SSD fail is not so big of a deal--that said, I've seen the mechanical drives in our arrays fail more often.

I would have a look at anandtech.com and techreport.com if you really want to get deep into the SSD arena.

That means you too Ken.

Uuuuuuhhhhhh...... "What about me?" he asks while mouthing the wording with his belly button.

Oooohhhh, Mark.... You can be a smart one too.

The reasoning behind that logic -- to increase longevity by decreasing the write cycles on individual blocks -- is dated. Pretty much all modern consumer-grade SSDs have what's called "wear leveling" technology that effectively eliminates the downsides of small file I/O on an SSD. By not allowing your SSD to do what it does really well, you're decreasing the benefits of using it.

It's important to remember that, in most cases, the claimed write cycles for SSDs are actually the guaranteed minimums, unlike the MTBF numbers for mechanical HDs. You'll most likely get many more cycles than that number unless you seriously abuse your SSD.