SSD Drive + Logos 4 Mac = Speed?
Looking at people's reported performance issues and considering what sort of application Logos 4 Mac is — it would tend to be 'disk bound' (held back by HDD performance) — I was considering getting a average size SSD drive and putting the whole Logos 4 installation (app+data) onto it.
I have a pretty strong feeling that it should make a significant difference to Logos 4 Mac running.
I found this website http://www.ssd-for-mac.com/ which has reasonable information on SSD drives specifically for Macs.
Question is — has anyone gone done this road? Retroactively fitting an SSD drive into their Mac? Anything you could share on result?
"I want to know all God's thoughts; the rest are just details." - Albert Einstein
Comments
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What is your system configuration? laptop/desktop, disk info, amount of ram...
On my system, macbook pro 13" with 8GB of ram, I don't find logos to be disk bound most of the time. If it's indexing, then yes, but otherwise not really.
It does "hitch" every now and then when scrolling through a resource as it pulls in more data. I expect an SSD would help there.
If you don't have much memory (< 4GB) then you might be swapping depending on what else you have open. Then your whole system is disk bound at that point.
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I've got a Mac Pro with 2 x 2.66 Dual-Core Xeons with 6GB RAM and fast 1TB HDD. Memory free during average use is around 3 GB. It's not struggling.
Logos 4 has to constantly refer to disk during normal operations — for an example of this load up the Information Panel and then hover/click in Bible passage words like 'God'; 'Jerusalem' and the like and watch that spinning wait graphic — it's the nature of the beast. It might only be little tastes of the HDD (nothing like indexing) but it's still going back to the HDD all the time. From Activity Monitor here's the peak on my machine — 1.8 MB/sec HDD read when I clicked on the word 'God'.
Given that that is happening I am pretty sure that having a SSD with high read speed would bring more speed — was curious if anyone had been down the road before.
"I want to know all God's thoughts; the rest are just details." - Albert Einstein
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Patrick S. said:
was curious if anyone had been down the road before.
I suspect solid-state storage is one reason why MacBook Air performance is generally acceptable despite the fact that it has a substantially slower processor and tighter limits on RAM expandability.
A faster disk (including a good SSD) should help Logos 4 performance quite a bit.
Director of Engineering for Enterprise and Operations
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Cameron Watters said:Patrick S. said:
was curious if anyone had been down the road before.
I suspect solid-state storage is one reason why MacBook Air performance is generally acceptable despite the fact that it has a substantially slower processor and tighter limits on RAM expandability.
A faster disk (including a good SSD) should help Logos 4 performance quite a bit.
I was looking, and wondering about a Hybrid drive. It is supposed to make 'learned' patterns of using the 4G SSD portion of the 500GB drive. Thanks to my wonderful replacement insurance, I am not now again using a 17" Hires MBP with 8Gigs of RAM and a 500GB 7200RMP drive. I considered the Hybrid drive, but wondered if it could really be much different than having the extra RAM. Any thoughts?
“... every day in which I do not
penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of God’s Word in Holy Scripture
is a lost day for me. I can only move forward with certainty upon the
firm ground of the Word of God.”0 -
Dewayne Davis said:
I was looking, and wondering about a Hybrid drive. It is supposed to make 'learned' patterns of using the 4G SSD portion of the 500GB drive. Thanks to my wonderful replacement insurance, I am not again using a 17" Hires MBP with 8Gigs of RAM and a 500GB 7200RMP drive. I considered the Hybrid drive, but wondered if it could really be much different than having the extra RAM. Any thoughts?
Mmmm — I think it may not be a major difference. I don't personally have experience with Hybrid drives, but given that it is only 4GB it is not going to fit all of Logos in it. Also it most likely uses some algorithm related to most frequently used files, in any event you will not be able to direct it as to which files it uses SSD drive for.
Given that there are various sizes of SSD drives, and sizes like 60GB are coming down to reasonable price — if SSD makes a difference — then most Logos installations would benefit without breaking the bank.
"I want to know all God's thoughts; the rest are just details." - Albert Einstein
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I am now interested in another option. It is a 48 gig SSD drive that plugs into the ExpressCard slot and looks to run at full PCIExpress speed. One could move the Logos directory here and greatly increase the speed? Anyone trying this yet? See here.
“... every day in which I do not
penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of God’s Word in Holy Scripture
is a lost day for me. I can only move forward with certainty upon the
firm ground of the Word of God.”0 -
I have SSD in macbook 2.8 GHz with 6 GB RAM. SSD is quick, but it did not speed up logos4mac as fast as I expected. I thought it would be a lot snappier.
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I have a 17 inch MB pro early 2009 with 2.93 coreduo intel with SSD from other world computing and 8GB RAM.
Logos works fine with me, but is the least snappy of any other program I have ever used.
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I was just reading about SSDs on ZDnet. According to the writer, SSDs require certain parameters to run optimally. Now he was addressing those on Win 7 and how to make sure those were in place. I suspect some of those things may apply to the Mac too , but they are likely to be different settings.
The mind of man is the mill of God, not to grind chaff, but wheat. Thomas Manton | Study hard, for the well is deep, and our brains are shallow. Richard Baxter
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I run it on my Momentus XT, and it is a bit faster, the whole system runs faster. However in is not a big increase at all.
Truth Reformed Bible Church, Colorado USA
Teaching Elder.
Evangelist, currently preaching in Ukraine
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MacBook Pro 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7; 4GB Ram, SSD
Clicking God in Scholar's Library (took about 1 sec) worked 5.2 MB/sec
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I have a mid-2010 MBP 15" w/ 2.4GHz i5, 8GB RAM, and an Intel ssd alongside the original Hitachi drive.
I have done just a little side-by-side comparison, and frankly, I don't see that much difference between the hdd and the ssd! I would have thought the read/write speeds of the SSD would have made all-things-Logos faster, but I am finding much of the daily use stuff to work at almost the same speed. With the new SSD, my boot and program load times really went down; however, Logos was the exception It does not snap open as do almost all of my other programs, taking about 20 seconds to load, even with the Internet option turned off. I have about 1700 resources, and my default workspace has the ESV, AFAT, and Greek NT open. Basic and Library searches take about the same time, usually no more than 5s for either drive.
It seems much of whatever is going is disk-indiferent. Let me say, I am pretty happy with L4Mac so far; I did not have any terrible speed issues with the original drive. Be mindful that mine is but one experience.
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I suspect there is a lot of speed to be wrung out of optimizing L4Mac, since (from forum posts) hardly any has been done yet.
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."- G.K. Chesterton
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Ben said:
I suspect there is a lot of speed to be wrung out of optimizing L4Mac, since (from forum posts) hardly any has been done yet.
Optimization is happening along with feature exposure (on Mac) and bug fixes - tend to not be mentioned in release notes
Edit: 4.2a SR-2 release notes include forum links with couple performance improvements
Logos 4.2a Beta cycle included several performance optimizations.
Wiki Slow Performance section includes:
* To help Logos development know what needs speed improvement, please post repeatable steps on Logos 4 Mac forum including timing, logs (see How to Report Bugs in Logos 4 Mac), and screen shot(s).
Observation: forum thread(s) with repeatable performance issue(s) tend to get higher priority since Logos knows sluggish feature being used. Beta testers can post to Mac Beta forum (where performance optimizations initially released)
Wiki has Beta program information and risks
Keep Smiling [:)]
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