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Can't wait to get my 3.4ghz i7 with the dual drive. Mine is not shipping until July 6. Wonder how fast that will be?

Excellent article, James. I am curious how much faster the fans run in a 21 inch iMac with HD + SSD, versus an iMac with HD alone? Is there any noticeable temperature difference?

I've been following user reports at MacRumors by people who received the 21.5 inch iMac with SSD, versus those who installed their own OCZ Vertex / Intel / other branded SSD. Apple's Toshiba SATA-2 SSD benchmarks considerably lower than most third party SATA-3 SSDs that have aggressive garbage collection. Whether such differences are perceptible to an average user may be another matter. MacRumors has all the info to step you through the installation process if you're feeling brave.

27 inch iMacs with SSD are reportedly just starting to ship, though international buyers may have to wait a bit longer. I'm not aware of anybody who's actually received a 27" iMac with factory installed SSD yet. There's been much speculation that the SSD in the 27 inch may be different than the Toshiba SSD pictured above. I consider those rumors to be unlikely... but we'll find out in a few days.

BTW, there's a great thread about how to turn on TRIM support in OS 10.6.7, and somebody even wrote an app that will do it for you. Search MacRumors for 'TRIM Support Enable'. Depending on SSD brand, not everyone sees much speed boost.

Following my examination of available data I decided to forego Apple's SSD when I place an order for my wife's new 21.5" - 2.7 gHz iMac this morning. We may add an SSD in a few months, internally or via a Thunderbolt box, when it becomes more affordable. $600 for last year's Toshiba SSD seems overpriced for our needs.

With two drives, how is the data split between the HDD and SSD? Can you control it with /etc/fstab (or equivalent)? Or how do you manage to keep you iTunes library off the SSD, and key OS and working files on the SSD?

RossLindell, on 08 June 2011 - 06:31 AM, said:

I was wondering the same thing. What do you put in the SSD vs what do you put on the traditional drive? Are you putting the OS and your programs on the SSD and your data on the traditional drive?

I'd love to see a comparison between the new MacBook Airs and a custom-order MacBook Pro with an SSD!

That's the idea. To make both drives play together nicely, put your user folder on the hard drive and substitute a Un*x symbolic link to it on the SSD. I am unclear whether that must be done in Terminal, since I don't have an SSD. Perhaps this is a topic for another Macworld article.

tln1ltj2, on 08 June 2011 - 07:03 AM, said:

You both raise excellent questions. I'm slowly migrating away from spinning media on all my family's PC's. RossLindel is basically right. If your SSD is space limited, you would put media on the HD, and point iTunes to the library location. Myself, my music is about 21 GB, and my documents, are about 8 GB. So I keep them on the SSD. i have SSD's on the large side though (250 GB or more through RAID 0). Movies, software downloads, non performance critical files go oon the HD's, which are replacing floppies.

This post has been edited by klahanas: 08 June 2011 - 08:47 AM

In the article it says that there was no improvement when using Handbrake ripping. If the media is first copied and stored on the SSD then ripped from there, it's no longer having to wait for the DVD drive to spin up, then hit power save, then spin up again, etc...

I know ripping my DVDs rip a lot faster when reading from the Hard drive.

This post has been edited by PhilipOrr: 08 June 2011 - 09:21 AM

The following tests may be of benefit to the audio community:

Comparison of the number of simultaneous audio playback and record tracks for HDD and SSD using the same computer and several DAWs (Logic, ProTools, MOTU Digital Perf, etc.).

I agree - where your data is should be important, and comparing SSD and hard drive PC performance is problematic without that information. There are two other factors that affect the value of an SSD on the iMac: 1) The newest SSDs are SATA III, but the Apple bus is SATA II, so even if you bake your own you won't be able to get optimum performance; 2) The MacBook Air bypasses the SATA issue altogether by mounting the SSD directly on the motherboard using the much faster PCI Express bus; the iMac won't truly rock until it does the same.

That said, the real barrier to using SSDs is still price. It remains a high-end option. There's also the fact that SSD development is advancing rapidly so that whatever investment you make now will soon be outdated. As a result, I think an internal SSD in an iMac is a dubious investment. In my opinion one would do better to wait till an external Thunderbolt SSD drive option is available. This will offer both flexibility and upgradeability. Thunderbolt offers PCI Express speeds that simply cannot be matched by an internal SATA SSD, particularly on the SATA II bus currently available in the iMac.

Have a working directory for active files on the SSD too. There's little point putting your applications on the SSD if you're making it read information from a hard drive.

PhilipOrr, on 08 June 2011 - 09:20 AM, said:

There's no question that converting DVD to MP4 is MUCH faster if you have a pre-ripped iso image, instead of ripping from the DVD or Blu-Ray. Then, the bottleneck becomes the CPU. I don't expect there to be a huge performance difference for this when switching to SSD. The benefit of SSD is the overall experience of it's use. Even "slow" SSD's blow away the fastest hard drives. Booting is extremely fast and applications pop on screen, ready to go.

klahanas, on 08 June 2011 - 08:46 AM, said:

All that is possible .. .just have to decide what works best for you ....

In the user account preference, you can set the path of your home directory. For example, I have my home directory pathed to a mirrored drive that is no my boot partition. I don't recall how you get to it (think option button) but easy enough to google. I would recommend having another account setup that points to the normal boot drive. This way, something goes wrong, you can log in with that account to reset.

The itunes library can reside anywhere. This can be set in the itunes preferences. You can take further and segrate one of the media folders such as Movies to somewhere else. A simple shortcut from the Finder to the new location works fine. In my case, I moved the Movies to my Air Capsule. The caveat to this is that you have to wake up the air capsule before accessing movies otherwise it can't find. On a normal drive in the computer, this wouldn't an issue.

I see some posts mentioning unix symbolic links instead of shortcuts. I can't say I am versed on the difference but for the scenarios mentioned above, a Finder based shortcut works fine.