SSD speed in external enclosure.

[DELTAsnake]

I have an iMac which has a WDC WD1001FALS-40K1B0 as the pre installed hard drive.

While SSDs are still to small for me to put all my data on they are big enough for me to fit OSX and all my apps on with plenty of room to spare.

Since Mac's have the ability to boot OSX from a Firewire 800 drive I'm wondering if I got a SSD like the new Intel SSD and put it in a Firewire 800 enclosure would it be faster than my built in HDD? If it would be faster, roughly how much faster would it be?

 

[sub mesa]

It would be faster, but you want to connect the SSD as directly as possible, and with Firewire you have an Firewire-to-SATA emulator device sitting between the SSD and the motherboard. Generally you don't want this and some of these 'emulators' are actually very bad.

If at all possible, connect the SSD directly. Any 'data' or storage disk can be safely used with Firewire/800; here latencies are unimportant and sequential transfers are all that matters, likely.

 

[evongugg]

TRIM or similar is not available yet for Mac OS X.
I would wait on that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM_(SSD_command)

 

[sub mesa]

Just leave a portion of your SSD free, not partitioned. That should help. 10GB is a good enough amount. The SSD will use this to remap difficult 'small writes' to free space, rather than performing a very slow read-erase-program cycle.