Crucial M500 vs Samsung 840 EVO

In my honest opinion the one thing you do not want is a Fusion Drive. As Lex has pointed out it was a Stop Gap solution to the problems that no longer exist. I am not sure Apple is still offering Fusion drive and if they are that will probably stop with the next generation of iMac's.

It is plagued with problem and slow downs over time. Not only that but it put a lot of wear and tear on both the SSD and rotating hard drive as it is constantly reading and writing to both drives. More so than OS X does anyway.

Ico_ss wrote:

Ok guys thanks for both responses...

Clinton, off course I've googled around... But the problem with googling is that you get so many "options" nowadays that you don't really know what to go for... Even simple questions like: "Which is better for a mac, the M500 or the 840 EVO?" you got tons of people that tell you to go one way or the other.

Thank you both!

Yeah, I spent some time looking for the trade-offs of Fusion Drive after Lex advices, and I think I will undo the Fusion next weekend... now that I'm pretty confort with the whole process... Like I said I don't really need the OS to manage my frequently used file... for the SSD I'll keep only the OS and its apps. All my files will be on the HDD. And that's pretty easy to manage manually.

Next week I'll do it...

Thanks!!!

Best Regards!

"All my files will be on the HDD"

To be sure: do not put the whole Homefolder there, only all user data (music, movies, and all that collections, and documents and al that), but you already know that.

Lex

Hello,

I decided to give my Mac Pro2,1 a new lifetime...

So I upgraded to Mavericks, added a PC GT610 graphic card (soon a second one) and some USB + FW Pci-e cards.

I'm now considering to change the HDD for SSD.

First for the complete system.

I ended my research to 2 models the Crucial and the Samsung ones. I need a 1 TB one.

But am still not sure which one would be the best.

Crucial seems to be much more stable while Samsung is cheaper.

I understood it's not really about speed but more about performance, stability, TRIM, firmware, etc...

So, what's your opinion: EVO 840 or Crucial 550 ???

Thanks in advance.

Either the Crucial M500 one terabyte (my favorite since I've always had Crucial SSDs) or the Samsung 840 EVO one terabyte would duite you well. Just sort of curious because Crucial are usually less expensive than Samsung!

And I just have to ask - how did you upgrade your graphics card? That's not something I'm familiar with but would be very interested in doing!

Clinton

EDIT: Nevermind, I see that you've a Mac Pro and not a MacBook Pro!

Message was edited by: clintonfrombirmingham

I've been surfing on some (French) forums and discovered that since Mac are on Intel they were pretty much lucky to be able to accept PC cards...

After reading carefully some advices and people experiences, I tried and it just worked great.

It makes the upgrades like 5 times cheaper than always buying Mac version cards... Even for a Pci-e USB card!

Regarding the storage amount, the Crucial 500 is 960GB only while the 550 is 1 TB like the EVO 840...and 64GB difference is already something...

I also read the Crucial 550 does not get that hot as the 500 is and some other details that makes it much more attractive than his brother.

Now my dilema is really between Crucial 550 and EVO 840, price, but more important the stability, lifetime etc...

Was really good to read your posts, gave me really important information.

I still cannot decide ;-)

Shiiro,

Just because of reliability alone, I would go with Crucial. I bought my M500 960GB just a few short months before the 1TB M550 was announced - while I don't regret it I sure wish that I had waited!

Crucial's just like a car you can depend on - I monitor the Crucial forums quite frequently and those that actually 'break down' are far and dew between. I suppose that I'm brand loyal, too... I also have Crucial RAM!

Clinton

Hahahahaha....

Thanks a lot Clinton...

So it sounds am gonna spend more money than I expected...

I will give my decision some day.

Thx again...

I second Clinton's notes.

In a lot of threads there has been discussion how to choose between Crucial and Samsung. I will put the main thoughts here:

The Crucial has the Marvell controller, while Samsung's controller is based on the less advanced Sandforce controller, resulting in differences of flexibility (mainly for firmware updates, and 'garbage collection').

There is not really a difference in capacity, but there are differences in 'overprovisioning' (bits that are not user available, but are there to replace 'bad' bits).

For warranty and lifetime there are only unimportant differences.

@Clinton: in the first few months after the availibility of M550, there was a 'limitation' on the Crucial site about compatibility for some MBP models. That has now gone, I could not find out if that was a real issue or that there was perhaps a firmware update. (My M500 1tb has been 'taken by a friend, but luckily I bought 2). Have a good day, Lex

Amazon fr has both: evo 1TB approx 399, M550 1TB approx 425.

Thx for your post Lex.

All these information sound like Crucial might be a better choice in terms of reliability...

Indeed, Amazon offers both...

Some days ago, LDLC offered a promotion code to get the EVO 840 1TB at 50€ less, which was about 350€... a nearly 80€ cheaper deal with the Crucial. Now it's over.

Am thinking of taking the Crucial then...

Actually, I have another question in mind.

It's said the SSD boosts the system boot and apps launch.

But will it also boost the performance in general, like video rendering, image processing, etc ?

The rendering and so are mainly faster when you have more Ram. The SSD is faster for disk read/writes, thus if your ram is too low for doing it's job, there will be 'virtual' memory needed on the disk.

You can easily see whether you have enough Ram: in ActivityMonitor click the Memory module, in the left bottom see *swaps used": a zero or low figure after use of the memory hungry apps means that you have enough ram and having a ssd will not change the speed of those apps much. In the middle bottom you see the actual "memory pressure": green means enough, orange is almost enough, red means that ram upgrade will speed up the apps; on the right bottom you see "compressed", this means a sort of time compression that Mavericks can do, and a low figure (0-10MB) means enough ram actually.

Alright Lex.

Very useful information.

As said, am not a pro even though am using a Mac for nearly 15 years now...

So, as far as I understand, first of all increase the RAM... am already on 14GB (max 16GB on that model, but I read 32 GB would work also).

So that means I would first gain on booting and opening apps, not really on work performance, right ?

If the gain is more on the read/writes, wouldn't it be better to dedicate the SSD to the datas instead of the system ? Or either both ?

I am sorry: I explained about the Activity Monitor of Mavericks: you probably have an earlier OS (Lion perhaps?). In the Activity Monitor of earlier PS you get by long not that good information.

Indeed your model 2,1 can have 32GB of Ram.

I would use the SSD for everything OS and data, unless you have less than 100GB free, then I would move a data library to the second disk. You then have to check your backup strategy to make sure that you have the same number of backups of that library.

In general: it is the writes that wear the SSD, not the reads.