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MacBook Pro SSD and memory speed increases for photographers
No self respecting photographer leaves home without their MacBook. (Yes, I know Windows 7 is pretty decent now too, don't flame me.) My 15" MBP from a few years ago is getting a bit long in the tooth and because I now travel everywhere by train and bike, I needed to lighten my load a little and get a small enough packsize to pack camping gear and camera gear into a couple of small panniers and a rackbag.
Cue new lightweight Macbook. I want to like the MacBook Air. Lightweight, small, pretty. But as a producer of stitched panoramas and video, they simply lack the processor grunt even with the speed boost that the SSD provides. And when I am away from power sources I will take any extra battery time I can get. And lastly, I like things to last. Everything in the Air is soldered to the motherboard so there is no way to upgrade, or replace SSDs that wear out from high number of disk writes which I am likely to do from moving lots of files around. The SSD lifetime thing is very much still under discussion, and there is probably a lot of misinformation about it, like mine, but SSD lifetime is improving! Even so, on a £1200 (with twinks:-) machine I would rather not take the chance. So 2.4GHz 13" MacBook Pro it is for me. Fast processor, long battery life, upgradeable and, still looks cool in Starbucks.
This isn't a MacBook Pro review, it's just an outline and (basic) test report of how I have pimped mine to give a bit more speed appropriate to photographers and videographers. I hope it is off use to others who are looking to speed up their Mac.
The SSD advantage
Solid State Drives (SSD) offer a lot of advantages over conventional spinning platter drives. Fast reads, relatively fast writes, increased reliability as there no moving parts and lighter weight. I have seen some debate about improvements in battery life, so I won't make that claim and really can't be bothered to measure it.
The two main contenders that I considered were the Intel X25-M Mainstream Solid State Drive
You can find out how to upgrade the HDD in a Macbook on the Apple site or I like this lifehacker article that also describes how to install two drives (this link doesn't always work that well for some reason).
Here are some rough numbers relevant to photographers:
Boot time:
- HDD = 32-37s
- SSD = 25s
Not the boost I was expecting, but from reading up, not everyone appears to get the 5-10s boot that some claim. I don't know why. Maybe the Core2Duo architecture in the 13" is not as good as the i5/i7.
Stitch a 12 x 70MB TIFF panorama using PTGui:
- HDD = 9m
- SSD = 5m 50s
That's a good improvement. Keeping an eye on Activity Monitor cpu%user went from approximately 47% utilisation to 90% utilisation which means the CPU was waiting for the disk less when using the SSD. I could also hear the fan a bit more trying to keep the CPU cool under the heavier load. I am just waiting on 8GB of memory arriving to see what effect this by reducing paging.
Open the resulting 518MB 16bit TIFF file in Photoshop Elements 9 (first open of PS)
- HDD = 25-35s
- SSD = 18s
Again, not as super fast as I would have hoped from some reviews, but still a good improvement.
More memory
I have also ordered a Kingston 8GB memory kit which I am still waiting for. Hopefully this will speed the machine up further by preventing paging. I'll update the performance numbers once I've got the memory installed.
Conclusions
Overall, I am fairly happy with the gains of a SSD. There is a significant performance gain in my core apps and things just feel a bit snappier. The computer is also a little lighter and it should be a little more reliable being bounced around inside my rucsac or bike pannier. Longer term I might replace the Superdrive with a second drive for extra storage, but that will have to wait. Now, I just need to calibrate the screen.
For really in depth info have a look at Macintosh Performance Guide. He's not mad keen on the Crucial Drive, but I can always change it in the future.
Buy from Amazon
If you want to buy either of the drives mentioned, you can help keep me in shiny stuff by buying through the following links. Amazon is awesome, although I actually ordered the drive through Crucial uk as their service is also awesome.
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