I have a late 2007 Santa Rosa. I’ve looked at the Crucial m4 - and the Mac complaints in the forum are staggering, and unanswered.
These include m4s with the 0009 and the 0309 ROM update.
The primary complaint is that battery life that was 5 to 7 hours is now 80-90 minutes, with no explanation
why or setting to determine what needs changed.
Despite Micron showing that their line of m4’s IS Mac compatible, they don’t offer any help in the forum, and
not a single person had a solution for the problem.
That’s enough for me to stay away from it.
For me, if the difference is just $20, I’d always get the fastest one. You will upgrade that machine eventually,
and even though whatever size you put in there will not be considered much by that time -
better it be able to laugh in the face of a SATA 3 bus than just a SATA 2.
Figure that saturating the SATA 1 bus will take about 180MB/sec. You have a great little drive in there now,
and if you want to test how fast it is, look no further than the
AJA app to see how fast it reads and writes.
Don’t worry about the setting. Just choose the same one for your various drives, and you’ll learn all you
need to know. This app measures the speed of your drive to match the output of a video card’s frame rate.
As in… is your drive fast enough to keep up with the video card. So it measures both read and write speed.
Because your Virtual Memory (Swap File) will be using this drive, your speed should increase by at LEAST
50%. That’s giving the Scorpio Black the benefit of hitting 100MB/sec, which honestly, I don’t think you’ll
see it do better than 75MB/sec. It’s a GREAT drive, and a lower power drive on top of that, but still, going from
75MB/sec to 180MB/sec is going to eliminate beach balls the way that adding in the extra 2GB to the 4GB you
had in there previously did. My Safari beach balls vanished when I went to 6GB.
The Kingston HyperX 3 was on sale at NewEgg the other morning (and sold out) for $89.99 after a small
rebate (I think it was $15). This is the fastest drive out there along with the OWC drive. Way faster than
your SATA bus… but again, even though it is only 120GB, eventually that drive can be put to use in SOMETHING,
and it will do it proudly. If you put it in a USB 3 box, when we finally GET USB 3, it would be excellent for such
a task, as USB 3 has been testing out at about 3Gbit/sec (real world) and that’s 375MB/sec. And Asus is now
offering something to turbo boost their USB 3 on motherboards by 170%, making it actually as fast as the rated
speed (thus topping it out) as well as using it with the new X79 motherboards to create your own giant
SSD/mechanical hybrid drives, so it will always have use.
As long as it lives (and 3K P/E binned NAND is rated an average life (the lowest life) for 8 years at the average
access that was used to come up with that number) — and even when it dies, & can’t write to it, you can still read it.
I recommend you pick a few models that you know are Mac friendly and grab them when they hit the price point.
The Samsung 830s all say Mac compatible, and the 3 ARM 9 controllers are handling In/Out and Wear Leveling,
but I’d sure like to see a review of it in a Mac rather than be the one to test it. Amazon at least gives you peace of
mind — know that the NAND in the Samsungs in their latest fast synchronous NAND at 22nm, so
it does read and write on both sides of the waveform, but even they haven’t hit past that 400MB/sec write speed
as of yet (but again, this all depends on binning your NAND at 3, 5 or 10, and they may simply not be willing
to do that yet — their increases thus far appear to have come from the ROM upgrades, and all are well out
in front of the SATA 1 bus found in our Santa Rosa’s).
The trickiest part is the clips on the topcase along the front....