Q: How can we use the SDXC PORT ?

Reda_1 wrote:

 

i wonder how can i use the SDXC to boot my future macbook.

Install Mac OS X on an SDXC card.

I am not talking here about sd camera cards.

If you're thinking SSD, you've got the wrong slot.

Regarding "And do you think i made the right choice by choosing the 15" 2.2 ghz i7 ?"

Big step forwards versus the 13" MBP, very small step behind the 2.4 Ghz i7.  You will do just fine.

Ciao.

Reda_1 wrote:

 

should i install it a second time on an SDXC card ?

Yes. It makes a good emergency boot device, IMHO.

<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3553#12>

Which card u advise me to get ?

Sorry, I can't advise you on that. Read the reviews, get whatever has good reviews and you can get at a good price in your location.

"I heard there is out there some cards to make it boot faster. I am not talking here about sd camera cards."

It is an sd camera card. Same animal. I have a 16 mb SDHC with a bootable OS on it. Check out Macworld article for the "how to."

http://www.macworld.com/article/1141401/mwvodcast114.html

The Mac doesn't access the full speed capability of the SDXC, so it's unsuitable as a alternate boot option, it will be very slow, you might as well use a USB thumb drive instead of a fragile SD card that can be lost.

If you want something like that, I recommend you partition your boot drive 50/50 and use Carbon Copy Cloner to auto-update/clone A to B every few days.

The second 50% of the hard drive is much slower than the first 50%, I won't use it as I'm a performance minded, but it makes a nice backup/restore emergency boot and everything is there like on the first 50%.

 Most commonly used backup methods explained

ds store wrote:

 

The Mac doesn't access the full speed capability of the SDXC

That is incorrect.

The speed depends on the bus to which the card reader is attached. On some Macs, it is on the USB bus, so the speed is limited by the USB 2.0 spec; such Macs cannot get the full XC speed. However, in other Macs (all the newer models, I believe) the card reader is on the PCIe bus, communicating at speeds in excess of 1.5Gb/s. They get the full benefit of the increased XC speed. See

<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3553#4>

Ah good then.

Do you know of test results showing the actual speeds for each model?

Not disputing you, but I'd like to see the numbers 

Reda_1 wrote:

 

So how can we please add an SDD without removing the super drive or the hard drive ?

Buy an external enclosure and have it dangling from the Mac all day. But, of course, even with a FireWire 800 interface, you won't be able to exploit the full speed of the drive.

Reda_1 wrote:

 

i thought it works like an SSD to make my mac faster and use it every day.

No it's not for that because it's hanging out the side, not recessed with a push spring action like cameras use.

So how can we please add an SDD without removing the super drive or the hard drive ?

A Mac with a 5,400 RPM hard drive not only gives good battery life and large storage, but also boots in a decent amount of time (30-40 seconds).

OS X no matter if your data is available instantly will still require 20 seconds to boot, that's the fastest I've gotten it with RAID 0 setups on SATA 2.

Same thing with programs, they take time to setup and nothing can be done to change that.

OS X Lion is auto starting programs like browsers reloading pages again, this is the real problem for slow booting computers.

A proplerly taken care of 5,400 RPM drive is perfect for MacBook Pro's now, the older 32 bit models could benefit from a 7,200 RPM drive.

The key is keeping your data all on the first 50% of the hard drive, partiton the second half as a clone of the first for bootable and backup purposes. Zero Erase all new drives before use and Zero Free space before large data/paritons created.

When we get RAM in 1TB amounts, then it's possible to have a instant boot computer, SSD's are only faster on large file transfers to another SSD  or equal RAID, smaller files and booting it doesn't make too much of a difference really to be spending huge amount of money for 500GB + SSD.

One day when it gets cheaper, right now it's still way too high to be practical.

Reda_1 wrote:

 

i thought it works like an SSD to make my mac faster and use it every day.

How could it?

The fastest SDXCs on the market are under 70MB/s. Your average hard disk nowadays is north of 250MB/s, perhaps closer to 300MB/s; your average SSD is twice that. Moreover, SDXC is optimised for sequential read/write; so it won't perform well as a disk replacement.

There's only one way to make your "mac faster and use it every day"—replace the internal disk drive with an SSD, or replace the internal SSD with a bigger and faster SSD.

For benchmarking on SDXC, see, for instance,

<http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sdxc-sdhc-uhs-i,2940.html>

fane_j wrote:

 

There's only one way to make your "mac faster and use it every day"—replace the internal disk drive with an SSD, or replace the internal SSD with a bigger and faster SSD.

Disk I/O has alwas been the main bottleneck of all computers. So you either make it occur faster or you reduce de times it needs to occur.

In the "faster" section, the issues I have with SSDs are several:

• Their price still needs to go down way more. The cost per MB of SSD-based storage is still vastly greater than that of HDDs. Yes, if you compute in extreme environments like karting down Baja or skydiving off the Himalayas, a ruggedized SSD is great, but most of us mortals live in the safe confines of a homey office.
• The size of SSDs has to expand much more. Yes, they are inching up to the 500GB size, but HDDs are at 1TB and promise to break that barrier before the year is out.
• If you purchase your SSD preinstalled in your Mac, you will be paying a big premium, compared to marketplace SSDs, even those from the same maker but not Apple-branded. This also applies to RAM.
• If you put in a non-Apple-branded SSD, Lion will not enable TRIM support by default and you will have to go "under the hood" to enable it. Without TRIM, you will not get the full performance and durability benefit of an SSD.

Might be me, but I prefer to stick with HDDs for now, just making sure they are of 7200RPM spindle speed.

In the "reduce" section, must point out that Lion is a 64-bit beast. Meaning that all data structures are twice the size of previous 32-bit cats. Regardless of "minimum" specs, 4GB RAM is the new practical minimum and 8GB makes the fat cat much happier. But buying RAM from Apple is not a financially wise decision; an 8GB upgrade from reputable vendors can be had for around $40, in stark comparison to the $200 premium charged by the Apple store. For the same $200 or a bit less, you can get a 16GB upgrade instead, not officially sanctioned but that works just fine with the latest model Macs. In this case, I don't think the OP will need as much, but it is something to take under consideration. The extra RAM will drastically reduce the disk-based paging that the memory management carries out, thereby minimizing that bottleneck.