| Joined: | Mon Apr 2nd, 2012 |
| Location: | South Lakeland, UK |
| Posts: | 4066 |
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I fitted a Crucial MX250 SSD in the optical drive bay on day one! The optical drive bay SATA is on a different, separate bus from the other four drive bays so it may be more efficient in there. I had intended fusing it with a WD 1Tb Black drive but having given it some thought I decided against it. By storing my images on a WD Black drive, I get them on the screen pretty well instantly. I decided the added complexity of a fusion drive was't warranted to solve a problem I don't have.
As for boot times, the SSD boots my Mac Pro in about 20 seconds, booting from the Seagate 2Tb drive which was installed at purchase was just over 1 minute.
Boot times aren't much of an issue for me, unless for maintenance or installing OS updates I tend not to shut my computers down for weeks on end.
The real benefit from an SSD is when launching and using software, Lightroom takes about a minute to launch on my Mac mini, where with the Mac Pro and SSD it's under 20 seconds, also moving between modules of Lightroom or Photoshop is pretty well instant whereas on a normal HD there is a noticeable lag. I haven't tried the Nik filters yet, that WILL be interesting because I was suffering artefacts on some images at the edges which became very pixelated and blocky, could only be fixed by cropping. I put it down to the integrated GPU of the Mac mini, which is another reason for this adventure.
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Robert.