Mhackintosh blog

If you read my blog carefully, you know that I think that simple hard-drives are just too slow for modern computers:

• I installed 3 x 1TB hard-drive (RAID-0) on an original Mac Pro, at my work, to make it litterally fly. It’s original 320GB hard-drive was just like a brake for the system!
• I use 2 x 1TB hard-drive (RAID-0) on my hackintosh (4×3.4Ghz/8GB/GeForce GTX260), but still I find it not as fast as it may be. I tried a 1st generation 64GB SSD (Kingston SSD V Now) but wasn’t faster really.
• I swapped my 500GB 5400rpm hard-drive of my MacBook Pro to a 500GB 7200rpm and finally a faster 1TB 5200rpm. Before going to SSD

MacBook Pro 17″ Unibody Core2 Duo 2.8Ghz upgrade

I expected mobile Core i5 and mobile Core i7 to be really faster, but as MacWorld show, mobile Core i7 is marginally faster than Core2 Duo 2.8Ghz and slower on major tasks (as launching Windows in VM for example!). I will wait to change my MacBook Pro that there’s a real-world speed gain of at least 25%! Nobody will see difference when a computer is just 10% faster!

Instead, I tried the Kingston SSD V Now 64GB, a 1st generation SSD, that is theorically not faster than hard-drives. I discovered a world where my fan stop making noise, where all launch (including boot and shutdown, or sleep mode) where real faster, and a 2×2.8Ghz laptop that is more reactive than my 4×3.4Ghz desktop! hot!

So I decided that it,s the way to go, upgrading my MacBook Pro instead buying the new model, and I decided to have room to spare and take a real-fast SSD (a 3rd generation) with SATA 6Gbps to be able to use it on future laptops and desktop, that will have this connection. SATA 3Gbps limit this SSD to 250MB/s approximately, but with future 6Gbps-enabled laptop or desktop, it’s given to deliver up to 315MB/s, 25% faster on future computer!

So how does it perform on my actual laptop, compared to hard-drives I installed, 1st generation SSD, and how does it show up on a full-system bench as XBench?

Benchmark of hard-drives and SSD on my MacBook Pro

I forget to bench the 500GB 5400 rpm hard-drive that was shipped on my MacBook Pro. Anyway it’s not interesting, the 500GB 7200rpm was visibly faster as well as the 1TB 5200rpm. And Apple is well known to put the less-expensive drive into their “Pro” computers, that translate to under-performing hardware in many case (same for videocard/GPU).

This chart is clear, the CRUCIAL C300 256GB is just astonishing compared to 1st generation SSD (KINGSTON SSD V Now 64GB), and still beating hard-drives by a 5X performance-ratio! (1.8X for sequential access, 21X for random access! ouch!)

There’s 2 points that the chart doesn’t show:

• Even with it’s score near the hard-drive, the 1st generation KINGSTON SSD V Now 64GB is far faster in daily use, increase autonomy (real-world!), and the laptop feels more reactive than a 4×3.4Ghz desktop! (1.7X faster random access explain it)
• the 317 XBench subscore is astonishing for an storage system, but in fact toally in range with other subscores, from 190 (OpenGL and memory) to 340 (User Interface test), so the performances are better balanced, and it shows…

Whole system XBench performance

As said previously, with all susbsystem scores ranging from 190 to 340, except hard-drive (under 60), the system is not well-balanced, you are waiting for it to boot, waiting when launching application, waiting when using demanding applications, and screaming when using LightRoom because the thumbnails take so much time to be at least corrects! It is no more the case when disk subsystem cope with the CPU, Memory, OpenGL, User Interface, … A modern Core2 Duo laptop just fly, and it translates to XBench global score:

Notice that I put Mac Pro XBench average score, to put this in perspective. I won’t say that my laptop is faster than an average Mac Pro, it’s better to say that on some tasks, that demand disk IO, my laptop will beat them all, hands up! And I used a Mac Pro at work, I know the feeling I had with it, it just underperforms on heavy-io tasks, compared to my upgraded laptop! Seriously!

In short…

Changing from hard-drive to 1st generation SSD (KINGSTON SSD V Now 64GB) was an interesting experience, score doesn’t change, SSD is slower on most test, but user experience was impressive, beating my 4×3.4Ghz desktop with my 2×2.8Ghz laptop, giving me envy to use it more for demanding tasks! Score don’t tell the whole story when it comes to SSD, these benchmarks have been devised for hard-drives, and SSD instantly change your system responsivness!

And upgrading to a 3rd generation SSD (Crucial C300 256GB) is more impressive, but even if score is far over everything I saw or used, even on our server farm, this drive is faster than I need actually, will probably be used until it’s death, because it could give up to 25% more performance on future laptop or desktop, and you see how it pushes the XBench global score, showing how a balanced modern laptop could perform against powerful desktop equipped with under-performing hard-drives!

For myself, I love the CRUCIAL C300, but the experience started with the Kingston SSD V Now 64GB, and I think that you should avoid 1st generation SSD (except Intel’s that are probably the best SSD on the market, but don’t offer 256GB at this time), and go for 2nd generation or 3rd generation SSD, of any size. The firsts minutes you will use it, you will rediscover your computer, you will even launch the most-demanding application, just to see them fly on screen!

SSD is the way to go, it deserve a test, you might be surprised by what YOUR computer might do with one inside

I just bought an used (3 month old) Kingston SSD Now! 64GB SSD, for $130. It was a great SSD when launched, but for now, it’s under average on write speed, even largely under hard-drive speed, not talking about my RAID-0 2×1TB 7200 rpm system disk, but really actual when talking about read speed, with 220MB/s.

I would like to test a SSD for Mac OS X system, applications, and a bunch of usual files, including Windows and Linux Ubuntu VM, to see how it far compared to hard-drive, especially 2 hard-drives grouped in RAID-0. You have read many many benchmark, I suppose, and me too

I am not equipped to bench it, and anyway it doesn’t interest me. I would like to see if an average (by today metrics) SSD could do a difference in day-to-day use of Mac OS X, and what will be the feeling I have with it, compared to physical hard-drives in RAID-0, on a fast Mhackintosh (4×3.4Ghz, 8GB, GeForce 8800) extensively using firefox, mail, VMware fusion, Parallels, NetBeans (Java-coded tool I use for PHP development), MySQL database and more than that Adobe Lightroom for my pictures as a photographer.

Let’s playyyyyy!!!!! I will come back next week with more than MB/s, a feeling, a human report, maybe some advices!

I have a Mhackintosh with Core2 Quad Q6600, 4-cores running at 3.0Ghz, and ran GeekBench 32bits on it. Final score is deceiving, but Integer score, that matter for my kinda application is explosive : 7098!

It’s over a Core i7 2.8Ghz iMac geekbench 32bits Integer score (under 7000), so it’s a perfect fit for a computer that will run up to 3 Virtual Machines for development and Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL (LAMP) software simulation and test. All these software do mainly if not uniquely Integer computation.

In this case, floating point computation is of no importance whatsoever, and memory speed not so important with 8MB cache on-chip

PS: I will go back to 3.2Ghz and test reliability of the Quad-core Mhackintosh under heavy load, at 3.0Ghz it’s perfect, I just re-encoded 3 Full HD movies in 4.3GB H.264 today!

As I expected, even with Core i5, the new 27″ iMac is faster than quad-core Mac Pro, and even 8-core Mac Pro, as benched by MacWorld. Moreover, the Core i7 version adds a mere 8% to the overall performance!

If you don’t need fast hard-drive in RAID, ability to put more than 16GB RAM (that is plenty of RAM even by today’s standards) or ability to have fastest graphic card (OpenCL oriented, like GeForce 8800, GT120 or GT130), the new 27″ iMac Core i5 is a fantastic performer with the right price tag!

I knew for sure the iMac Core i5 will beat the quad-core Mac Pro, and I am not deceived this time

The actual Mac Pro may sport a Radeon 4870 graphic card. A high-end graphic card that Apple sell for few hundreds bucks, but that is totally bad at OpenCL, a great additionin Snow Leopard 10.6…

There’s OpenCL Benchmark of Radeon 4870, which show it slower than nVidia 9400M IGP (on Mac Mini, Mac Book Air, …).

Why radeon 4xxx are so slow? They lack “shared memory” that is the equivalent on a graphic card GPU of a processor cache, so every access to memory is 20X to 30X slower than access to cache (or “shared memory” in this case) and it could not compete even if it’s a 400$ graphic card!

If Radeon 4870 could not compete with GeForce 9400M, how a Radeon 4670 will? Having 4X slower memory and 3X less computing power, the Radeon 4670 will be crushed by GeForce 9400M, not talking about GeForce GT120 or even GT130 of last generation iMac!

Even high-end iMac with Radeon 4850 (0.8X slower than 4870 GPU with 2X slower memory) won’t be able to compete with entry-level iMac! It’s sad!