VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[Mike Harrison]

Are there any Mac mini owners who have, themselves, installed an internal SSD?

All along, I've been recording to one external USB mechanical drive and subsequently backing up to a second of the same type. But I'm told recording to (and editing from) an SSD will make a big improvement in application performance.

However, I've also heard that SSDs don't last as long and/or can have more read/write issues than mechanicals.

Anyone care to share stories/recommendations? Thanks!
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[todd ellis]

i heard the same thing about the "life span" of a SSD - i've been using one inside my hackintosh for 4 years now - seems fine to me. "they" say that there is a finite number of read/write cycles, but i haven't seen anybody put a number on it. i use it for the OS & as only.

i edit video to/from THIS and have been MORE than happy. edit on the SSD - store to the bazillion TB of external spinners in the closet.
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"i know philip banks": todd ellis
who's/on/1st?

[Mike Harrison]

Thanks, Todd.

Beyond the SSD itself, my concern, specifically with the Mac mini, is its size. It's so compact (7.7" x 7.7" x 1.4") that quite a lot has to be removed in order to install an SSD into it. As badly as I'd like to improve the performance of my application (Adobe Audition), the thought of having to dissect the computer to replace a drive every x years is a little disconcerting. Oh, what to do, what to do.

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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[Bruce]

I'd take it to an Apple "genius" or other pro to install. A few years back I tried to upgrade my RAM memory in my Mac mini (which many said was super easy) and slightly bent one of the metal clips that held the memory chip in. I could not get the RAM to seat after that. I had to pay a few hundred dollars to replace some of the internal hardware because of the tender nature of that clip.

Oh, and I had no back up computer and since they were going to take a week to fix it I had to buy another mini and start from scratch. Aargh. We think our clients should work with pros, and maybe we should too.

I'd also double check to see if you're really going to get better results with an internal drive. I've never had a problem with external spinners and I do some big projects. For rocket science milliseconds better performance can help. For explainer videos.... I'm thinking not so much.


B
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VO-BB Member #31 Enlisted June, 2005

I'm not a Zoo, but over the years I've played one on radio/TV. .

[Mike Harrison]

Thanks, Bruce.

Yes, I'm awaiting a response now from an Adobe Audition pro on whether I can expect about the same amount of performance improvement by using an EXTERNAL SSD rather than an internal. For reasons you describe, I'm hoping he says yes.

And finding the RIGHT SSD may take some time, too, even though Todd has had good luck with his. Someone else recently had some terrible luck with his external SSD.
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[Bish]

I bought a MacMini 6.2 (Late 2012) a couple of years ago as a house media server. It came with a 2TB spinny thing as its hard drive. I bought a kit from MacSales... 256GB internal upgrade kit (with all the tools needed) which allowed me to fit the SSD as the boot drive and use the 2TB as an internal second drive. It works like a charm. I too think the reports of SSD being of a limited life are exaggerated. I have, so far, replaced the boot drive in my old MacPro, the drive in my MacBook, and this MacMini... the only failures I've had in over a dozen years of Macs and SSD are with the standard spinning ones... which seem to drop like flies after ten years!
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Bish a.k.a. Bish
Smoke me a kipper... I'll be back for breakfast.
I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls.

[Mike Harrison]

I'm too unsure of myself to take the mini apart, so I've decided to go with an external SSD. And I was originally thinking Thunderbolt, because I've already got several USB and Firewire drives going. But, I've since learned my mini (a model 6,1) is Thunderbolt 1 but uses a Thunderbolt 2 port, and trying to find a compatible drive AND compatible cables when we've already been in Thunderbolt 3-land for several years has already taken more than a day. So, I've decided to go with a Glyph Technologies Atom SSD and connect it via USB. But that brings me to a new scenario.

To free up a USB port, I'll have to add my secondary audio drive to the primary audio drive AND my Time Machine drive already on Firewire. But I just now realized: am I putting myself at risk for losing data if, for example, I were reading and writing to one of the audio drives and Time Machine were to begin doing a backup?

Hmmm...
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

[chrisvoco]

While your mileage will certainly vary, and luck - good and bad - plays a role, the solid-state storage you buy these days is probably not likely to fail very quickly at all. Every once in a while, there's a run of drives that fail prematurely, but not significantly more than spinning drives. Allegedly. Probably. Hopefully. It used to be more of a risk - maybe five years ago, a company in my industry had to recall a whole slew of appliances because a whole production run shipped with a batch of ssd's that all had premature failure.

Generally, reading from your ssd doesn't hurt, and mere writing doesn't hurt - but excessive rewrites of the same blocks will eventually hurt. If you come across the phrase "burning a hole in your flash", that's what that is: repeated rewriting of the same blocks. A block can be rewritten some number of times before it fails, and when it does, the device marks that block as bad and works around it, and you never know the difference. Of course, if enough blocks fail, your drive is toast - just as it would be with a spinning drive.

The storage device itself and/or the driver understands this and will work to spread writes across blocks, keeping track of housekeeping statistics including how many blocks are marked as bad. A good implementation will differentiate between blocks marked bad at the factory and those that have failed since you began using the device. How you get at these statistics varies with your OS, or you can download one of the many such free utilities that collect the usage details and present them to you in a nice, pretty way (you might search for "ssd S.M.A.R.T." to find one). You can keep an eye on block erasures, erased blocks, retried writes, and bad blocks, but don't keep too close an eye on them, or you'll drive yourself bonkers.

But you measure these things in pretty big numbers. Is lots of frequent debug and system log writing a candidate for wrecking your flash memory? Quite possibly. Is a normal, healthy quantity of audio recording, re-recording, and rendering as likely to cause trouble as quickly? Probably not. Are devices cheap enough these days to have multiple spares and keep complete backups on hand? You betcha.
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Finally, Ford stops starting to say things and starts.

[Frank F]

Apple's SSD is not a true SSD it has an analog component to it. It also has a failure rate of about 1.5 to 2 years.

Just had a friend who after much consternation with Apple about recovering data from a bad drive asked me for help on installing a true 6tb SSD in his Mac (nearly new). The new SSD works flawlessly and speeds have increased substantially over the Apple version of same with analog platters.

However, there is a cavaet: installing a non-Apple drive may void any warranty you might have. Apple no longer supports the older Mac SSD's and will not pay to replace them under warranty.

F2
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Be thankful for the bad things in life. They opened your eyes to the good things you weren't paying attention to before. email: thevoice@usa.com