What is slowing down your Mac?
I just received my Crucial C300 256GB SSD, a real fast SSD, fastest on some metrics (with SATA 6Gbps bus), but in the leading pack for the rest, still under Intel X25-M on some test, but finally a good SSD, as it offers 256GB capacity (Intel is limited to 160GB) and a good performance/price ratio.
But my question is, how fast is fast? How do you measure it? Against which reference?
Yes, you need a reference, because speed is just relative to another thing. So I choose to follow XBench, because they choose a good computer as a reference: PowerMac G5 2×2Ghz, 2.5GB RAM, 300GB 7200rpm hard-drive, GeForce 6800 Ultra. Not so bad,m except maybe for the hard-drive, many people used to install 2 hard-drive in RAID-0 to have better performance and better system balance. Anyway we will consider it as balanced.
Fact is, my MacBook Pro 17″ unibody Core2 Duo 2.8Ghz is balanced differently, as sold: CPU is 2X faster and 2.9X faster on multi-thread, memory is 1.9X faster, videocard 1.7X to 2.2X faster. So general performance are between 1.7X to 2.9X faster … except the hard-drive that is 2X SLOWER! Yes you read it, Twice the processinbg power, half the hard-drive speed, that’s why you and me waiting for unresponsive but still over-powered laptop or desktop.
The hard-drive is the thing that slow me down when I power up my Mac, open some browser, use dashboard (the more widget the slower!), launch CS4, NetBeans, browse photo collections with LightRoom, …
While a laptop from today is 2X to 3X faster (with Core i7) than PowerMac G5, it’s hard-drive is 2X slower, meaning sometimes your 2010 “Pro” laptop is slower than 2005 desktop Mac, and some other time so faster. Everytime you use the hard-drive, your laptop slow down to a crawl! You have to put something that is 2X to 4X faster than PowerMac hard-drive to have a laptop balanced as a RAID-0 PowerMac and stop waiting for disks IO!
Hard-drives are something from the past!
