IMac – Which SSD Thunderbolt Product For Main Boot Drive for the iMac

hardware-recommendationimacraidssdthunderbolt

So I have a 2012 iMac. I got the base model 21.5" which means I have a painfully slow 5400 RPM hard drive. The pure SSD option would have cost $1,300 ($1 more than the $1,299 base price) if I could even get it but you had to get the 27" to even have the option.

The iMac is very fast with the obvious bottleneck being the 5400 RPM HDD. I want really a better than stock setup with insane speed. Considering that anything under $1,300 is actually a savings (lol) and with the possibility of even being superior in speed to the internal SSD. The issue I'm most concerned with now in my choice is if it will be bootable. This is especially true with the RAID options because as the ones in my price range are SOFTWARE RAID I wonder how it could be possible to be bootable?

I've narrowed down my choices to these four options, in no particular order:

  1. OWC Mercury Helios 240GB
    Essentially a thunderbolt PCIe expansion chasis with fast PCI based SSD

  2. Pegasus J2
    Thunderbolt 2 x 128GB SSDs configured in RAID 0

  3. Pegasus J4
    4 drive thunderbolt 2.5" storage chassis, RAID configurable
    I'll probably get 4 x 64 GB SSDs and configure them in RAID 0 or maybe RAID 10

  4. LaCie Thunderbolt SSD 240GB
    Kind of the same idea as J2

Any advice would be excellent. Feel free to make an alternative suggestion if you prefer. I'm ready to go as soon as I can make a choice.

Again my machine is:
Apple iMac 21.5", Late 2012 / i5 2.7 GHz / 8 GB RAM / 1 TB HDD / GeForce GT 640M 512MB DDR5 / OS X 10.8

Best Answer

In the end I went with the most expensive but also the fastest option: #1 which was the Mercury Accelsior PCIe based SSD hardware RAID array (RAID 0 by default which I will keep) in a Mercury Helios Thunderbolt PCIe chassis. The main reason was because it was the only one that mentioned it was bootable (and made a big deal out of that fact).

I paid $799 for the 240 GB model (it's 128 GB X 2 minus the unusable amount...a nice touch for the seller not to count that). It's got a lot of technology built into the card including processors and cache etc. to monitor and control the hardware RAID array including extra error checking and load leveling/balancing. Also it's theoretically upgradable (each drive is called a "blade" and while they don't yet sell independent blades they may in the future). Also the PCIe chassis is an extra bit of the investment that could live beyond the SSD, just like the whole arrangement could live beyond the use of my iMac itself.

This is a great review on it where they say it's "really fast. Ridiculously fast."

A guy on youtube has a (somewhat boring) video of his Mac Pro taking 3 minutes to boot and launch paint shop pro with his hard drive and then after setting up one of these it cut down to 15 seconds! Crazy balls out fast.

This is the sellers sites for;

Of note is that if they didn't offer the bundle discount and if it were not so much more expensive I might have opted for this much more attractive chassis.

Or for even more and larger chassis with multiple slots and supporting larger sized cards.

These chassis got me thinking about the possibilities with thunderbolt. Now any iMac or MacBook can be as capable and expandable as a Mac Pro...there are even developments with video cards in one of these things! I do wonder if it would be possible to take a MacBook Air and hook up a thunderbolt PCIe chassis with a high end graphics card with the display on the internal monitor?

If I was one of these manufacturers, or even Apple, I would consider making a full on chassis with PCIe slots and storage areas, etc. I really wanted a Mac Pro but they were so old...now I can get some of that goodness piecemeal, though for a price. :-)

I get the device about a week from now and will post back my impressions if anyone is interested.

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