Mac Mini and the OCZ Vertex 2

Last week I upgraded my early 2009 Mac Mini (Core2Duo, 8Gb RAM, 320Gb 7200rpm HDD) with an SSD. I do heavy multitasking, and my HDD was just slowing me down. I did some research and brought it down to the Intel X-25G2 and the OCZ Vertex 2 (A SandForce based SSD, which works quite different than the Intel SSD). I went with the OCZ Vertex 2 E 60Gb… I am no expert in this SSD stuff, but what I’ve figured out so far is that Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) doesn’t support TRIM, which should not be a big problem with current SSDs under Mac OS X from what I’ve read and noticed so far.

The installation itself was as “easy” as I described earlier.

I then booted from the Snow Leopard installation DVD, selected Restore from Time Machine Backup and 30min later my system was back up. As a side note: You can restore from a bigger HDD to a smaller SSD (as long as your data fits with no problems of course), but you will need to format the SSD using Disk Utility first. Otherwise the Restore Wizard will tell you, that your Backup doesn’t fit! It does format it later on again…

(I did re-install yesterday because of some weird issues with graphics performance, but that had nothing to do with the SSD or restore process. I had annoying lags when scrolling in Lightroom or Firefox for example since the Graphics Driver update for Snow Leopard a few months ago…)

Everything works smooth and well. System boot has decreased from 1min 15s to about 30s, OpenOffice now starts in 2s instead of 20s, Lightroom switches quickly between it’s modules… My average write speed is around 90MB/s, average read speed is around 150MB/s. Both for one stream. Should be much higher with multiple streams combined. But what’s more important is the very low access time.

After about one week the Vertex 2 looks like a good teammate for the Mini.