P or X 256 on a MacBook Pro late 2007

[phoboulinos]

I would like to ask, how does the X256 or P256 behaves on Macbook Pro (3.1) late 2007 since I am considering buying one. Has anyone observed problems on the particular macbook model or would someone recommend not buying an SSD disk to use in the macbook pro ?

 

Thanks

[RAM GUY]

They will be faster than the HDD that came in it but some of the early models may be limited to S-ATA 1 speeds.

[fcol313]

I've been using a P128 on my Macbook 3.1 (late 2007) for 2 months now (1 month on 10.5 and then did a normal (not clean) upgrade to 10.6 when it came out). It has been working great so far (daily use including daily VM Fusion use; nothing else really disk intensive). My Fusion VM definitely boots/sleeps/restores much faster and all Mac operations certainly feel snappier. No degradation or stuttering so far. Xbench is reporting slightly slower speeds compared to other reports for the P128 (120 MB/s seq read, 60-75 MB/s seq write) but I still love it. I'm chalking up the slightly slower speeds to the Intel ICH8-M controller and SATA1 (although SATA1 should be able to do a little better, I think). In any case, the SSD is working well enough for my non-intensive needs.

 

I also started a thread about SSD usage in the VMWare Fusion boards but I haven't seen much traction yet:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/222187?tstart=0

 

Be warned that if you become a Mac-SSD early adopter, be prepared that you MAY need to recondition the drive periodically and MAY need to do it with a PC. IF (big if) there are firmware updates (check out other threads), they will also likely require access to a PC. But I'm just going to assume that any new firmware updates won't help Mac users (since the automatic "reconditioning" algorithms seem geared towards NTFS-formatted drives). But even if I need to clone my Mac SSD, "recondition" it (via a quick format?? or at worst by attaching it to a PC), then re-clone every 6 months (??), I can accept that. I regularly back up my drive using SuperDuper and Time Machine. So re-imaging back to the SSD every now and then will be worth the hassle.

 

EDIT: If you believe this article, you might want to choose an SSD with an Indilinx controller over one with a Samsung controller.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631&p=19

[RAM GUY]

The P series has garbage collection active if you have the latest Firmware Version VBM18C1Q and it should be active in any O.S. but its performance has only been verified in NTFS file system According to Samsung.