Finally had time to install the Crucial 960G SSD that was my Xmas gift last December into my Mac mini (late-2012 series, 2.6Ghz i7 Quad, with 16G RAM). The saga of the installation is a long and somewhat costly bit of entertainment but would certainly go way off-topic, but in the end I decided to stick with just one drive internal to the mini. It's up and running since last evening so I've had time to observe it through my usual range of operations. The previous drive was the usual nice, solid 1T 5400rpm standard drive that Apple offers for it, not bad on performance itself.
The SSD, however, transforms the mini: - Boot time with Mavericks and my usual complement of stuff with the 1T HD ran around 40-50 seconds, with some little bits like the DropBox plugin taking up to 90 seconds to initialize. With the SSD, everything is loaded and ready to run in less than 6 seconds from cold start. - My working catalog with Lightroom contains 89,000 raw, TIFF, and JPEG image files (all originals stored on a external FW 800 drive, catalog folder on the startup drive). With the 1T HD, Lightroom startup ran about 45-50 seconds. Now, with the SSD, it take five seconds from clicking on it in the dock to being ready for work. - Moving from image to image in Develop module without 1:1 Previews cached when working with Sony A7 24 Mpixel images would take about 4-5 seconds with the 1T HD. Now with the SSD, the load time is down to less than a second - the loading notification just barely flashes onto the screen. - Loading a 131 Mbyte VueScan DNG file (scanned Polaroid photo) into Photoshop CS5.1 from within LR used to take about 45-50 seconds with the 1T HD. It's down to 9 seconds with the SSD, *including* the Photoshop startup time. If Photoshop is already running, load time is about 3 seconds. Saving a full-resolution, 16bit TIFF from Photoshop of that same file takes less than a second. - ALL applications across the board on the system are now substantially snappier in operation. The drive I received last December is the "Crucial 960GB M500 2.5" Internal SSD", currently available from BHPhoto for $450. I see there's a newer model full 1T version now that is 20% faster on writes for another $50. That's well worth the price for this kind of performance improvement. The boring part: Installing a drive into the mini is not easy. To make the four-day-long story very short, an attempt to do this myself (and I'm not a total newbie to changing drives in computer systems, laptops, etc …) was a failure that resulted in damage to the main logic board. Luckily, my AppleCare is current and the local Apple Retail Store covered a new logic board and installation as warranty repair. (No, I didn't lie to them: I told them exactly how I broke the fan coupling off the logic board. Their response was, "Eh, it happens. Let's get your machine back together for you.") They had it all done and back to me in 48 hours. However, they would not install a non-Apple certified part like the SSD. Rather than risk breaking the logic board a second time, I used an external enclosure to format and clone my configured system and all data to the SSD, tested by booting it up from the external enclosure, and then paid a good independent shop that I've done lots of business with before to do the drive installation (We Fix Macs in Palo Alto, CA). They did a terrific job, turning it around in a couple of hours yesterday. Computer systems to process and render photos are as much a part of camera equipment as lenses and bodies these days, and at least as important. Getting this big a performance boost out of a relatively low cost, compact system like the Mac mini makes it much more efficient and practical to do what I like to do best: work on and produce photographs. enjoy! Godfrey --- "The fact that nobody understands you doesn't make you an artist." -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
