Crucial M500 960gb or Samsung 1tb 840EVO

[TimothyJohn]

Happy New Year everyone!!

I have a 17" Macbook Pro 2.3 GHz i7, 8gb ram. OS 10.8.5. (I won't switch to Mavericks until/if approved for PT 10). I mostly use PT 11, especially since UA is now 64 bit aax. These drives are both rated well, and currently around the $500 mark. My current system drive is a 500gb 7200rpm. However, it's around 2/3 full, and I'm getting close to feeling the need to upgrade.

Anyone have any experience with either of these two as a system drive? It's not urgent, but an upgrade is in the near future.

Any advice on transferring/changing system drives? Would using Carbon Copy suffice, or will it be better to reinstall everything? Or would Time Machine work? (The last time I had to do this was with a Mac G4-120gb drive. Wasn't running Pro Tools at all, much simpler to do). With the i7 Macbook Pro, it looks to be a major pia, but from what I've read about both of these ssd drives, it might be well worth it.

Thanks!

Tim

[Craig F]

Fresh is best
CCC would be my second choice

[Darryl Ramm]

Really no contest, I would go with the Samsung 840 Evo. It is capable of significantly outperforming the Micron M500, and Samsung have just a great reputation for quality and support with their SSD drives. In the consumer drive space Micron are probalby my second favorite drive brand and I'll be curious what they do in future here (when you go to Enterprise/server SSD PCIe drives Micron have some really frigging great products).

Performance comparisons of these drives are here http://www.anandtech.com/show/7173/s...odels-tested/8 But read that full review and their full review of the M500. Anandtech does probalby the best SSD performance reviews, many other review sites just run standard tests and often say/report silly things, apparently not really understanding how a SSD works or needs to be performance/stress tested.

[Darryl Ramm]

Don't use time machine. Just CC the current drive and keep it around as a backup in case you have problems. And confirm the SSD work perfectly well before doing anything else.

Try to do one thing a time, hardware changes separate from any OS or software changes.

If you later want to upgrade OS X versions then do that as a full clean install and manually reinstall any drivers and application software (after checking it is all compatible with the new OS X version). Do not rely on CC or system migration (system mangler) or any thing else to migrate device drivers or applications, they just cannot get it right all the time. Make it easy for yourself and build a software installer repository then you just need to go though checking they are all up to date before rerunning them.

When you install the Samsung SSD. First check the firmware ont he drive is up to date. Samsung has a great support web site. I would over-provision the drive by about 20% (leave 20% unformatted space.... on a boot/system partition let OS X create a recovery partition and the boot partition and then shrink the boot partition to leave 20% unpartitioned space. That helps with drive sustained write performance and wear life. And also install and enable the third party Trim Enabler utility. http://www.groths.org/software/trimenabler/ TRIM helps increase sustained write performance on Samsung and many other SSDs (including the M500). It's not safe to use on some older SSDs especially with early buggy Sandforce firmware.

[TimothyJohn]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Really no contest, I would go with the Samsung 840 Evo. It is capable of significantly outperforming the Micron M500, and Samsung have just a great reputation for quality and support with their SSD drives. In the consumer drive space Micron are probalby my second favorite drive brand and I'll be curious what they do in future here (when you go to Enterprise/server SSD PCIe drives Micron have some really frigging great products).

Performance comparisons of these drives are here http://www.anandtech.com/show/7173/s...odels-tested/8 But read that full review and their full review of the M500. Anandtech does probalby the best SSD performance reviews, many other review sites just run standard tests and often say/report silly things, apparently not really understanding how a SSD works or needs to be performance/stress tested.

"If you're looking for a king-sized SSD to put inside a typical desktop or notebook, the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB is the better all-around option. It performs better overall, offers a slightly higher capacity, and comes with software that improves the user experience. The M500 960GB is an excellent drive, too, and it has my enthusiastic recommendation. But the M500's strengths seem better suited to write-heavy workloads and entry-level enterprise applications. The 840 EVO 1TB is the more cohesive consumer product, and that's why it's our Editor's Choice."

I found this quote by Geoff Gasior on The Tech Report's review/comparison of these two drives. Does his observation have any relevance here? Considering I use my computer almost exclusively for Pro Tools, Sound Blade, scoring via Sibelius, and video via Adobe Premiere? It's the only review that suggests the M500 over the EVO in a particular circumstance. Oh, and yes I did see the anandtech comparison/review.

Thank you so much for your time!

Tim

[TimothyJohn]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Don't use time machine. Just CC the current drive and keep it around as a backup in case you have problems. And confirm the SSD work perfectly well before doing anything else.

Try to do one thing a time, hardware changes separate from any OS or software changes.

If you later want to upgrade OS X versions then do that as a full clean install and manually reinstall any drivers and application software (after checking it is all compatible with the new OS X version). Do not rely on CC or system migration (system mangler) or any thing else to migrate device drivers or applications, they just cannot get it right all the time. Make it easy for yourself and build a software installer repository then you just need to go though checking they are all up to date before rerunning them.

When you install the Samsung SSD. First check the firmware ont he drive is up to date. Samsung has a great support web site. I would over-provision the drive by about 20% (leave 20% unformatted space.... on a boot/system partition let OS X create a recovery partition and the boot partition and then shrink the boot partition to leave 20% unpartitioned space. That helps with drive sustained write performance and wear life. And also install and enable the third party Trim Enabler utility. http://www.groths.org/software/trimenabler/ TRIM helps increase sustained write performance on Samsung and many other SSDs (including the M500). It's not safe to use on some older SSDs especially with early buggy Sandforce firmware.

Your comments and advice are greatly appreciated!! In reinstalling, I found it's hit or miss as to the software company seeing the drive as a new computer or not. Obviously, when seen as a new computer, communication with the company becomes necessary when authorization becomes an issue. Many plugins don't use iLock of course. Couple that with the enormous amount of time some of these things take to download, (Air IEP II for instance), and it can turn out to be a real pia. And Craig F isn't the first person to suggest fresh installs of everything. However as I said, according to all that I've read, it could well be worth it with these drives.

Also, would increasing my ram from 8 to 16gb be an additional recommended step in all this? A preliminary one even?

Again, thanks so much!!

Tim

[Darryl Ramm]

Again, change one thing at a time if you can and always have an easy way to roll back changes. DUC is littered with problems for folks where they can't say what single thing just broke their system and who clearly never though through how they would get out of a problem if things don't go as hoped.

So if you don't really need to upgrade OS X for a while (and there should be no reasons to rush to mavericks for most users) clone the internal drive to the new SS (in an external USB carrier or similar) and make sure it works-- boots OK, no Pro Tools problems etc.

Cloning a full working boot disk to a new disk is fine, absolutely no issue. It is the problem when you try to do an in-situ upgrade. Don't do that. Start with a full clean install.

But if you know you really _need_ to upgrade OS X as well then you have the choice of trying to do a full clean install on the SSD. Hang it off the Mac in a USB carrier. And go ahead and do the install there of everything. At least you have an immediate fail back to the internal boot drive. And have another backup as well that is not on the system (too easy to overwrite the boot drive by accident).

I have no idea if more memory will help you, or what you are doing with Pro Tools. Obviously if you are running out of memory then add more, if you have Pro Tools HD 11 add more and use it as a timeline cache, etc.

If you save a folder of all you installers then you don't need to download them again unless they are out of date, in which case you should be downloading them again whatever you do. Being organized makes all this much easier.

You likely have to deal with license activation issues whatever you do. I would not let needing to deal with that influence good practices for OS X upgrades.

[TimothyJohn]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Again, change one thing at a time if you can and always have an easy way to roll back changes. DUC is littered with problems for folks where they can't say what single thing just broke their system and who clearly never though through how they would get out of a problem if things don't go as hoped.

So if you don't really need to upgrade OS X for a while (and there should be no reasons to rush to mavericks for most users) clone the internal drive to the new SS (in an external USB carrier or similar) and make sure it works-- boots OK, no Pro Tools problems etc.

Cloning a full working boot disk to a new disk is fine, absolutely no issue. It is the problem when you try to do an in-situ upgrade. Don't do that. Start with a full clean install.

But if you know you really _need_ to upgrade OS X as well then you have the choice of trying to do a full clean install on the SSD. Hang it off the Mac in a USB carrier. And go ahead and do the install there of everything. At least you have an immediate fail back to the internal boot drive. And have another backup as well that is not on the system (too easy to overwrite the boot drive by accident).

I have no idea if more memory will help you, or what you are doing with Pro Tools. Obviously if you are running out of memory then add more, if you have Pro Tools HD 11 add more and use it as a timeline cache, etc.

If you save a folder of all you installers then you don't need to download them again unless they are out of date, in which case you should be downloading them again whatever you do. Being organized makes all this much easier.

You likely have to deal with license activation issues whatever you do. I would not let needing to deal with that influence good practices for OS X upgrades.

Thanks again. I guess I gave the wrong impression. I have no interest in upgrading to Mavericks as of now. As I said, Pro Tools and Mavericks is still new territory so to speak. My main interest is in upgrading the HD from a 2/3 full 500gb 7200rpm disc to a 1tb SSD-either the M500 or the EVO. It looks as though the EVO might be the way to go. I don't use HD, so timeline cache is not available to me. Regardless, some seem to think that increasing ram has a more immediate effect regarding performance. I'll probably do both, ram and hard drive.

Do you have any thoughts as to what Geoff Gaisor said? "the M500's strengths seem better suited to write-heavy workloads and entry-level enterprise applications".

Tim

[Darryl Ramm]

I've already answered this, the Samsung 840 Evo is a significantly better drive.