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MPG Table of Contents   Page 1: Introduction Page 2: Which Mac Pro CPU for Photography, Video, Sound? Page 3: Clock Speed, Cores, and Cache Page 4: Estimating CPU Performance Page 5: Hits and Misses Page 6: Ordering Tips— What to Get and What to Skip Page 7: Solid State Drive Option Page 8: How Much Memory and Where to Buy Page 9: Value Compared to Quad-core iMac Page 10: Internal SATA Bandwidth Page 11: Test Machine Configuration Page 12: Photoshop Performance — diglloydSpeed1 Page 13: Photoshop Performance — diglloydMedium Page 14: Photoshop Performance — diglloydHuge Page 15: Photoshop CS5 Panorama (Auto Align and Auto Blend) Page 16: Digital Camera RAW File Processing Speed — Bibble Pro Page 17: RAW-file Import with Adobe Lightroom 3 Page 18: RAW-file Import with PhaseONE CaptureONE Page 19: RAW-file Import with Apple Aperture 3 Page 20: RAW-file Processing with Canon Digital Photo Professional Page 21: RAW-file Processing with Nikon Capture NX2 Page 22: Performance with PhotoZoom Pro Page 23: Performance with Helicon Focus Page 24: Performance with PTGui Pro Page 25: XCode C++ Build Page 26: Real World Memory Bandwidth Page 27: Performance with Apple Logic Studio Page 28: Performance with Adobe After Effects Page 29: Performance with Handbrake Video Encoding Page 30: Cinebench CPU and GPU Page 31: Conclusions

Apple Mac Pro (August 2010) —
Solid State Drives (SSD)

Apple now offers a 512GB solid state drive as an option (up to 4 of them can be installed).

Why pay a premium for an inferior product?

But performance is not the only issue—keep reading.

Value

My advice: don’t spend your money on a slower product. All SSDs are expensive, but value is determined over time by how well the product performs over the long run, its warranty, etc.

You get a short 1 year warranty with Apple’s SSD (three years if you pay extra for AppleCare, but that won’t cover degradation of SSD performance).

How about a 30-day money back guarantee and a three/five year warranty instead?! It’s a no-brainer. (Warranty duration depends on which product line is chosen).