SSD has more than one NAND module (usually 4-8 modules from what I have read). It helps increase read and write speeds.
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128GB Solid State Drive Suitable for MacBook Air
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SSD has more than one NAND module (usually 4-8 modules from what I have read). It helps increase read and write speeds.
Why is everyone bickering about the price. Of course it is expensive, its new. Would you rather them not come out with it at all because it will be expensive at first? Some rich people will buy it at first, it will rock, and slowly, the price will come down so more people can buy it. This is the same story for all new technology. If its too expensive for you, don't buy it. Nobody is putting a gun to your head.
The MacBook Air uses a PATA interface. Other than that, you are exactly right--pretty much all recent computers come with SATA, which is a pretty mature protocol now. I would guess that it was excluded from the MBA for the same reason 3G isn't in the iPhone--Apple couldn't get a small enough SATA controller chip. I can't imagine the size of the connector is an issue, though that's also possible. I can't remember what the SATA interface looks like.
Here are a couple of links for worthwhile reading:
Disadvantages of USB Flash Drives
SSD Advantages/Disadvantages
Post on write limits
I think that the main factors that you aren't considering when comparing SSDs to USB Flash drives is that USB Flash drives are not designed to support extremely high transfer rates, and are not necessarily rated to withstand the number of write cycles that a system drive with a swapfile (that is, a file that is used like RAM when RAM usage exceeds physical RAM capacity). When a swapfile is in use, the read/write profile of the location where the swapfile is contained gets pretty horrible-looking, and there is supposedly the potential for low-grade flash to get "worn out" by this.
Basically, the fundamental difference between the two types of flash is that USB thumb drives (the cheapest ones) use slow flash with a low write cycle rating. SSD has the highest quality flash that is much faster and rated for many more write cycles. That quality difference translates into dramatically more expensive components. Thus, USB flash drive prices are very poor gauges for what SSD prices should be.
I agree. I really hope this costs less than $1600. They say in their press release that this is a huge step towards making SSD more accessible to mobile users, so I have my hopes up.
But regardless, this is a big stride in making larger-capacity SSDs affordable for me in the near future. Even though I don't expect to be able to afford this drive, I know it will contribute to bigger, faster, cheaper drives sooner. And that is just plain exciting. I am very happy to see they have a device with a write speed that is almost as nice as its read speed.
Am I the only one that thinks the title of this article "128GB Solid State Drive Suitable for MacBook Air" is a little fast and loose? At the end of the article it is noted "We presume this SSD drive is a 5mm height (required to fit in the Air), but this dimension is not specified in the press release."
This is a BIG presumption. Since it is a presumption it seems to me that at the very least a ? should be added to the end of the article title. The fact is that the largest hard drive is currently limited to 80GB for the very reason that the larger capacity drives are thicker. I don't know why MacRumors "presumes" that a larger capacity SSD will not be thicker.
This is a BIG presumption. Since it is a presumption it seems to me that at the very least a ? should be added to the end of the article title. The fact is that the largest hard drive is currently limited to 80GB for the very reason that the larger capacity drives are thicker. I don't know why MacRumors "presumes" that a larger capacity SSD will not be thicker.
I know most everyone wants a bigger SSD, but I was actually looking for a smaller (and cheaper) SSD that would fit the Air. I'd say 32GB would suffice.
Honestly, I already keep almost all my files on a network share running wireless N (even some apps), so I dont need much.
Anyone know??
Honestly, I already keep almost all my files on a network share running wireless N (even some apps), so I dont need much.
Anyone know??
Are you thinking of buying an Air and replacing the 80GB drive with a 32GB SSD and coming out a lot cheaper than the standard SSD version? I suppose that is quite possible as there are a bunch of 32GB SSDs out there.
LOL WOW..... So you could have a cutting edge thin as air laptop for the one time low price of only $10,000.00 lolCall now and get a free blank CD-R!
LOL, I honestly didn't even realize this till after I posted, but there is no disk drive lol.
Well, I did pay $2,500 for an original Macintosh in 1984. I had to have it (sounds like the MBA doesn't it). This must be close to $10,000 in today's dollars. And I did not even get a blank CD-R. Not even a CD-RW. Or a hard drive for that matter.
whatever its price is, I want it in my next MBP. 6x the speed of the current drives. that's the kind of swap memory i'd like to get.
whatever its price is, I want it in my next MBP. 6x the speed of the current drives. that's the kind of swap memory i'd like to get.
whatever its price is, I want it in my next MBP. 6x the speed of the current drives. that's the kind of swap memory i'd like to get.
Well, the everlasting HDD technology has been around FOREVER!
Considering the time SSD and other flash based technology has been around,
the development and progress is pure AMAZING!!!
We still don't have bigger than 200GB 7200RPM drives available and 250GB or maybe 300gb 5200RPM drives now.
And it has taken a rather short time for us to get up to 128GB for SSD drives.
Now, the flash/SSD technology did start in what, 2000-2002? but still....
It's just impressive how fast SSD has developed.
And perhaps it is because the manufacturing costs being so much lower on SSD drives compared to HDD that it's becoming highly lucrative to be in the SSD making business.
Well, keep em coming and keep the price coming down.
Considering the time SSD and other flash based technology has been around,
the development and progress is pure AMAZING!!!
We still don't have bigger than 200GB 7200RPM drives available and 250GB or maybe 300gb 5200RPM drives now.
And it has taken a rather short time for us to get up to 128GB for SSD drives.
Now, the flash/SSD technology did start in what, 2000-2002? but still....
It's just impressive how fast SSD has developed.
And perhaps it is because the manufacturing costs being so much lower on SSD drives compared to HDD that it's becoming highly lucrative to be in the SSD making business.
Well, keep em coming and keep the price coming down.
So very, very true
Not true, newer designs are coming to fruition, both SLC, and MLC, both faster than previous generations.
Wrong/.
SSD are coming down in price, not because of any sales of MBA, don't fool yourself. Other uses/markets bring the prices down. No one 'forced' Apple to adopt old generation PATA SSD technology.
MBA used PATA because when it was being designed and SSD were being sourced, Samsung was the only one with a cost effective solution (not saying it's a reasonable cost solution in many people's mind, but that's what you get stuck with by going with bleeding edge thin technology that changes every 6 months. The largest SATA interface at the time was 32GB, soon it will be 128GB, but not in time for the MBA production run. Same with the CPU in the MBA. I wouldn't touch a MBA now with a 10ft pole, as soon as Monteviña ships in 3-5 months, you'll all be sorry, considering the significant improvements in power saving, and performance/watt, 2nd gen more energy efficient LED bl screens, etc. Pretty much guarantee you that the MBA Monteviña version will support SATAII interface, and will likely come with a 128GB Samsung SSD option, pending price naturally.
dvnation has only one current 2.5in Memoright 128GB SSD and it's priced @$3.3k
, don't expect to see that price drop to 1/4th that in 6 months or even by year's end.Here's a not so useful review of the Memoright 128GB SSD, as they don't even compare to the current speed champ, the Hitachi 7k200, let alone a 1TB desktop which are likewise 50% or faster than the Seagate 7200.2 notebook drive.
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4259
Apple will probably offer two capacities, 64GB at reduced price, maybe $700-800, and the 128GB if it comes in below $1500. Rational is that with dvnation pricing the Samsung used in the MBA @50% higher than what Apple is charging, you'd expect a $3.3k drive on dvnation, to be priced somewhere around $2k by Apple, being optimistic, a next gen 1.8in of 5mm thickness Samsung 128GB SSD might be around $1500 from Apple give or take a few hundred, but surely nothing less than at least $1k. Ever notice Samsung has a habit of changing the specs on their SSD info pages, for the same product over time?
Flash NAND memory is used in all portable SSD's that I know of. DRAM based SSD's are used in high-end server applications, and those cost tens of thousands.
Yes you are correct, as well as ehurtley...but then disagreeing with MR principals/top brass gets you in trouble fast.
The reason Mtron's are not suitable for a MBA, where we already have MR front page stories about MBA's limited battery life with either HD or SSD's is precisely (can't get MR team to read my links unfortunately and educate and inform themselves) in those current gen. SSD's that are super fast from Mtron, use much more power than the Samsung SSD in the MBA. See this link:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/21/mtron_ssd_32_gb/page8.html
Marginal reduction in battery runtime if you have a larger capacity battery in a MBP, not a MBA.
But, just like MR ignored my rumor submission about the digitimes article long ago about all the new Monteviña chipset details ( smaller 22mm dies of slightly less TDP as the current MBA, the quad Penryn mobile CPU that has a TDP of 45w) MR ignores the stories they themselves didn't read first about, ...must be an ego thing?
See these links below, not reported on MR articles (what is most annoying about most of these stories is you can't figure out which gen or process size is being used in each of these announcements, to cross reference which 'sampling and should be in mass production by' SSD is being talked about).
But of greatest significance potential disappointment that MR has not written into any of their rumors stories, is the fact that even with Monteviña, there may still be a bottleneck, as Capella (next gen chipset from Intel for the Nehalem processors) is the one touted as fully supporting SSD's. Monteviña is going to use a mobile version ICH9 chipset, ICH9M, which on the desktop side is already known to be a bottleneck to performance if you have a fast enough SSD like one of these Mtron's mentioned thread title article...not so with other MB's like AMD's solutions:
Read about it on anadtech and this discussion on toms hardware:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/11/21/mtron_ssd_32_gb/page9.html
Samsung SATA II SSD hits factories, due soon
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/02/15/samsung.fast.ssd.enroute/
Samsung reveals 128GB SSD, 500GB notebook HD
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/01/07/samsung.128gb.ssd.and.more/
The 1st noted <50nm process flash memory I've seen yet for slower SSD, Samsung and others don't seem to disclose which process for what SSD they announce (almost like they want to confuse you)
SanDisk unveils 3-bit-per-cell, 43nm flash
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/02/06/sandisk.x3.and.43nm.flash/
SSD news/info site:
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd.html
Hmm, me thinks this is the same person who bought that UAE license plate for $14.3 million
(j/k).
Nobody else seems to be seeing this... Granted the press release seems to have been translated into English so it's hard to know exactly what the details are, but it sure looks like they tried to create enough ambiguity in the press release to get just this kind of hype.
The fast drives will almost certainly be less than 128GB, and the 128GB drive doesn't write any faster than the Samsung drive. It reads about twice as fast but that's simply improving on the strong points of SSDs. There's also no real indication that the 128GB drive is PATA.
I've looked at the product section of their website with no additional information.
Flash based SSDs have been around at least 15-20 years. Throughout that time, they have always held exactly the same place in the market they do now, relative to spinning disks. Slightly faster read, slightly slower write, more rugged, smaller capacity, lower power and more expensive. What is interesting about that is that they have enough advantages that there are always niche markets where they are worth putting up with their disadvantages.Well, the everlasting HDD technology has been around FOREVER!
Considering the time SSD and other flash based technology has been around,
the development and progress is pure AMAZING!!!
We still don't have bigger than 200GB 7200RPM drives available and 250GB or maybe 300gb 5200RPM drives now.
And it has taken a rather short time for us to get up to 128GB for SSD drives.
Now, the flash/SSD technology did start in what, 2000-2002? but still....
It's just impressive how fast SSD has developed.
And perhaps it is because the manufacturing costs being so much lower on SSD drives compared to HDD that it's becoming highly lucrative to be in the SSD making business.
Well, keep em coming and keep the price coming down.
They are also much more expensive to manufacture than spinning disks-- which is why they sell for a higher price. There is certainly enough competition in the market, both from other SSD makers and HDD makers, to drive the margins down if that was possible.
Other things are changing in the market though-- for one, Flash memory for cameras, phones and media players has seen a huge surge in demand. That will bring profits into Flash companies that can be used to research better production-- but it will also encourage most companies to focus on where the money is which is cameras, phones and media players...
Another change is that storage capacities are outstripping need for many applications. I need ever increasing storage because my personal media is going digital and I need to store it. If I chose to not carry pictures, music and video with me everywhere I went though, my storage requirements would grow at a much slower rate. Documents are slowly getting more media rich, but the average memo isn't much bigger than it ever was. HDDs don't scale *down* well, so a user needing 60GB of storage may find themselves choosing between a 64GB flash drive and a 500GB spinning disk. Since they are both equally useful to the user, the user will choose based on total cost rather than cost per GB.
The third change is the ever increasing speed of processors. The storage bottleneck is painfully slow, and that is increasing pressure on manufacturers to get past it. SSDs are one route to easing this. Personally I think the answer will be in better use of the massive amounts or RAM we can address now...
Because it's SLC, and these can made into 5 mm drives (and don't need to be made into 8 mm drives), and so they can fit into the MBA.
Bingo!
I've seen some 32GB SSDs on Newegg for like $200-$400, but Im not sure they would fit. I really wish Apple would have at least given people like me the option of a 32GB SSD for cheaper. A cheaper price tag would push these into the mainstream more. They pretty much only offer the top of the line, so if you wannna go SSD, you gotta fork over major dough.
I know its small, but a lot of people dont need that much internal space. Plus, the Air is based around wireless anyway, so it seems like it would have made sense to offer lower capacity SSD drives for cheaper.
Well there is always some hinder to clear. I remember back in the overclocking days when the AGP became too slow. You could theoretically have the fastest CPU and GPU, but the AGP would slow you down. Lack of bandwith.
Been seeing the same thing with drives now. Todays drives, SSD or HDD could both get faster. But the bottleneck would be the hard-drive controller.
And even with increasing speeds on both the new FW800, E-Sata, USB3, Bluetooth 2 and what not. It still wouldn't cope with the drive controller.
Now, realtime performance on SATA II alone as a standard is too slow to even cope with a SSD drive that can read and write anything more than 100/100mbs
The spinning drives will NEVER get faster than SSD. that's a physical and mathmatical fact. sure the SSD today isn't ALL that, and yeah SSD has been around a good while.
You mention phones and cameras driving the technology. I would say, maybe at best. High-End cameras need FASTER flash memory. An ipod or a phone doesn't. Nor does the average user with an average camera.
Sure size would matter. as in GB. But size alone won't drive the companies into finding a new profitable source.
As long as the HDDs are profitable they'll keep making em.
If you demonstrate a HUGE performance difference from HDD to SSD, consumers and prosumers WILL adapt to the new standard quickly.
the higher profit margin will also justify the increased cost in both R&D, marketing and production cost.
Any new product being pushed as a higher margin on release than before the end of the cycle. Normally putting the margins at is highest when people are 1. Aware of the product. 2. Feel the need to adapt to the product. 3. Product has been manufactured in MASSES.
Currently I see a vague attempt from Apple to push out SSD. Which I think they do solely based on their need of Flash memory for their iPods and iPhones.
Like you pointed out earlier, they are more rugged. Indeed they are.
I'm not nessissiarily disagreeing with you. But I just think it's a shorter step to SSD than you might think.
Right now I the manufacturing as being a problem cleared. Flash is widely populated in like you say, phones, cameras etc.
The problem is PERFORMANCE, and that needs R&D. R&D thrives off of sales with huge margins. And you won't get huge margins without a marketing push. Not TV commercials. But people are very easy to persuade with slogans such as; "Intel inside". Why shouldn't the big companies be persuasive about marketing SSD to the masses?
It would move the margins on disk drives back up. And as far as cost.
the HDD manufacturing is NOT cheap either.
the drive plates inside the drive are fairly expensive. And 2.5 and 1.8" drives are considerably slower compared to their 3.5" bigger brother.
2.5" ad 1.8" SSD drives don't face the same problems. Maybe with size.
but NOT speed as it has no spinning plates.
Also, desktop sales are also A LOT slower today than they were 10 years ago. Which is by FAR apple's most lucrative marked.
The Samsung drive in the MBA uses 64 chips, 1GB each. There are two factors that set the price-- the amount of silicon used and the yield, or success rate in fabrication.
There are a couple differences in the types of Flash used-- SSDs use "single level cell" Flash devices, which is the older technology type. USB sticks and camera cards use "multi-level cell" Flash which is higher density.
MLC devices store more than one bit per transistor, so they use less silicon to store the same amount of data. They are also screened less severely because bit errors in pictures aren't as catastrophic as bit errors in your tax return, so they have higher yield. It takes longer to read and write to MLC devices because the voltages have to be applied more carefully and measured more carefully than they would in SLC devices.
SLC is faster and less prone to error, but the cost per bit is much higher.
No, Both the SLC and MLC drivers are 128GB and 1.8"
checking sources again...
update: the article i was referencing was wrong. It's still ambiguous as to the size of the SLC drive.
Mods - you can delete this post
checking sources again...
update: the article i was referencing was wrong. It's still ambiguous as to the size of the SLC drive.
Mods - you can delete this post
absolutely, I balked at first, but have all but my most sensitive data off site, through Google documents
Hmm, seems like it would be much easier to encrypt and psw protect your documents instead.
That way you wouldn't have your sensitive documents on someone elses server, not to mention not being able to do anything, if the net goes down, or you are not able to connect for any other reason.
I don't know of any company that would use the sorts of google docs for sensitive documents.
But then again, I don't know of anyone that would let you gain access to sensitive documents without logging in via proper security.
To me, your idea seems only fit for non-sensitive information, non-key documents and so forth. Just like web apps.