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A couple weeks back, the Intel 320 SSD in my iMac failed, leaving the machine unbootable and the drive appearing as an 8MB volume. This drive was replaced with a new 256GB Crucial M4 SSD and the Intel drive was returned for warranty replacement.
Having no immediate need for another SSD but not wanting to have this one laying around I decided to put it in a Macally PHR-S250UAB external enclosure and use it as another piece of fast storage on my Mac. While the installation went well I’m not quite happy with the performance. Despite being connected via FireWire 800 (IEEE 1394b-2002) couple of benchmark tools report only around 80 MB/sec read and 65 MB/sec write while the spinning piece of rust inside the computer reports something like 105 MB/sec read and 107 MB/sec write. It’ll be much lower latency than a spinning disk, but I’m not sure it’ll provide improvement over the internal disk, especially for things I was hoping to do with it like running VMs.
Maybe I’ll give it a try on my work laptop for VMs there, or maybe I’ll see if it’d work out well in Danielle’s Macbook Pro.
The photo above shows the external enclosure with an Intel-provided case sticker applied to the top in place of Macally’s branding. Except for the residual curved blue logo pieces at the end that didn’t fall outside of the cutoff area, I think this worked pretty well. Here is a photo of it all being assembled.
