256gb SSD, the one we've been waiting for?

[jedidove]

For awhile now samsung has been working on "teh fastest ssd ever omgz nd in liek 256gb!!11!!" although its been "on its way" since november. Seeing the 17in mbp with a 256gb ssd and given apple's history with samsung could this be that new ssd? Samsung does currently manufacture all the apple ssd's right? I ask this because I plan on getting a 17 mbp and $900 is a lot for a hard drive. If it is this new samsung one, I'll dish out the cash. If not I'll just take the standard HDD and use the money to buy that new samsung one when its released to the public (supposed to be by the end of this month).

Everything seems to point at the new samsung drive to be in the mbp (release date, etc.) but it would be nice to see some absolute proof.

 

[detz]

What do you use the computer for that the SSD will help with? I'm just curious, I too will be purchasing the new 17" but I think that money could be better spent on a ram upgrade so I'm doing my research.

 

[themoonisdown09]

If it is this new samsung one, I'll dish out the cash. If not I'll just take the standard HDD and use the money to buy that new samsung one when its released to the public (supposed to be by the end of this month).

Well... the 17" Macbook Pro won't be released until the end of January, so this could be the new SSD.

 

[jedidove]

What do you use the computer for that the SSD will help with? I'm just curious, I too will be purchasing the new 17" but I think that money could be better spent on a ram upgrade so I'm doing my research.

Well I'm a computer engineering student so this is actually a very late high school graduation gift from my parents. I told them I don't want a dime, just a kickass expensive laptop. So I'm maxing it out (8gb ram, 2.9's etc) because I know I won't be getting another computer for a long time. I don't know how much I'll see SSD performance gains in programming microcontrollers but I know it will make a difference when I dual boot windows to play games (too bad games don't all have osx versions).

I'm only being conservative about the harddrive because there's no way my parents will dish out 5k for a maxed out laptop with SSD and then another few hundred for a new SSD when the one in the laptop is brand new. If it isn't the samsung one I'm just gonna buy it seperate and treat that as the upgrade price (will probably be price similarly to the BTO).


If your wondering whether you should get the SSD or the RAM, go for the extra RAM. The SSD is really a luxury item. Software still runs fine on HDD's. However, app's and especially games are requiring more and more RAM these days, so in a few years 8GB will be nothing big. The only thing that would sway me to the SSD is that if you don't get it, your stuck with a 5400RPM drive. There is no 7200RPM drive (unless you buy it seperate). For most stuff that won't matter much, unless you're doing video editing or similar work where you read and write 10gb files day to day, but it is still nice to have at least a 7200RPM HDD. It kinda sucks getting the slowest standard HDD if you are paying the apple premium and want something that will last a long time. Overall however, RAM is probably a better investment.

Of course if you have the extra cash get the SSD though. You'll probably notice things to be a little snappier, its greener (if that matters), won't die as young, faster boot up, better battery life, and it probably won't be as hot as an HDD too.







Does apple release real specs on the hard drive's (manufacturer and model). Or do you have to check the laptop itself? If there were 128SSD 15 MBP's at the apple store I'd check the system info but I doubt they have the SSD's on the floor.

 

[jjahshik32]

Well I'm a computer engineering student so this is actually a very late high school graduation gift from my parents. I told them I don't want a dime, just a kickass expensive laptop. So I'm maxing it out (8gb ram, 2.9's etc) because I know I won't be getting another computer for a long time. I don't know how much I'll see SSD performance gains in programming microcontrollers but I know it will make a difference when I dual boot windows to play games (too bad games don't all have osx versions).

I'm only being conservative about the harddrive because there's no way my parents will dish out 5k for a maxed out laptop with SSD and then another few hundred for a new SSD when the one in the laptop is brand new. If it isn't the samsung one I'm just gonna buy it seperate and treat that as the upgrade price (will probably be price similarly to the BTO).


If your wondering whether you should get the SSD or the RAM, go for the extra RAM. The SSD is really a luxury item. Software still runs fine on HDD's. However, app's and especially games are requiring more and more RAM these days, so in a few years 8GB will be nothing big. The only thing that would sway me to the SSD is that if you don't get it, your stuck with a 5400RPM drive. There is no 7200RPM drive (unless you buy it seperate). For most stuff that won't matter much, unless you're doing video editing or similar work where you read and write 10gb files day to day, but it is still nice to have at least a 7200RPM HDD. It kinda sucks getting the slowest standard HDD if you are paying the apple premium and want something that will last a long time. Overall however, RAM is probably a better investment.

Of course if you have the extra cash get the SSD though. You'll probably notice things to be a little snappier, its greener (if that matters), won't die as young, faster boot up, better battery life, and it probably won't be as hot as an HDD too.







Does apple release real specs on the hard drive's (manufacturer and model). Or do you have to check the laptop itself? If there were 128SSD 15 MBP's at the apple store I'd check the system info but I doubt they have the SSD's on the floor.

In your case the 8gb of ram would be the luxury item. The SSD these days have a much greater impact than 8gb of ram. If I were you, I would just keep the 4gb of ram stock and save your parents the $1200 and wait until the prices come down (and they will come down).

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403 This is the ssd drive I just ordered and check out the review.

All reviews I've seen so far, say the ssd made the biggest impact in performances. Even upgrading to an SSD drive (in this case the intel x25-m) had even a far more performance jump than upgrading the whole system to the nehalem i7.

It just shows you that the hdd is the huge bottleneck when it comes to the already very fast cpu + gpu combinations out there.

In some tests, reviewers stuck the intel x25-m SSD drive in a 4-5 year old laptop and it sprung back to life and was fast as the quad core desktops~!

 

[detz]

I don't think I can justify the price, all of my time spent on a computer is spent writing code in an editor with a few minutes of compile time which is all CPU anyway. I can't think of one thing I do that accessing the HD that much that a SSD would help and I'm curious at who does. Even with games...do you think it's really going to make a [noticeable] difference?

I think I'm going to go the other way and get a 5400 500GB..I don't think I can store my life on anything less than 100GB now a days!

 

[jjahshik32]

I don't think I can justify the price, all of my time spent on a computer is spent writing code in an editor with a few minutes of compile time which is all CPU anyway. I can't think of one thing I do that accessing the HD that much that a SSD would help and I'm curious at who does. Even with games...do you think it's really going to make a [noticeable] difference?

I think I'm going to go the other way and get a 5400 500GB..I don't think I can store my life on anything less than 100GB now a days!

I just use my 1tb external hdd via fw800 to store everything else. And use the 80gb intel x25-m even with leopard and all my apps, I still have 50gb which is plenty for me.

I do a lot of heavy multitasking and the read speeds are incredible that it doesnt slow me down, especially using my mbp with a dual monitor mode + 6 spaces with vmware fusion running.

The intel x25-m ssd drive runs the vmware fusion like its native without any hiccups or slow downs and especially with multiple webpages opens up instantaneously without any bumps.

As for write speed it gets a constant 79 mb/s I know its nothing close to the 230 mb/s read speed that the intel x25-m gets but that is still faster than a velociraptor in a notebook, which runs absolutely cool and power efficient, which is amazing.

Reviewers even concluded that even if you have a 2-3 year old laptop, you'll get much more performance from upgrading to the intel x25-m than to even jumping to a nehalem i7, which is staggering.

 

[jjahshik32]

I don't think I can justify the price, all of my time spent on a computer is spent writing code in an editor with a few minutes of compile time which is all CPU anyway. I can't think of one thing I do that accessing the HD that much that a SSD would help and I'm curious at who does. Even with games...do you think it's really going to make a [noticeable] difference?

I think I'm going to go the other way and get a 5400 500GB..I don't think I can store my life on anything less than 100GB now a days!

I just use my 1tb external hdd via fw800 to store everything else. And use the 80gb intel x25-m even with leopard and all my apps, I still have 50gb which is plenty for me.

I do a lot of heavy multitasking and the read speeds are incredible that it doesnt slow me down, especially using my mbp with a dual monitor mode + 6 spaces with vmware fusion running.

I read in other threads and reviews that the intel x25-m ssd drive runs the vmware fusion like its native without any hiccups or slow downs and especially with multiple webpages opens up instantaneously without any bumps.

As for write speed it gets a constant 79 mb/s I know its nothing close to the 230 mb/s read speed that the intel x25-m gets but that is still faster than a velociraptor in a notebook, which runs absolutely cool and power efficient, which is amazing.

This is the cool part, I'm coming from a 2.8ghz 8 core mac pro with 16gb of ram with a 150gb raptor 10,000 rpm hdd and I sold it off and now I'm using a 2.53ghz unibody mbp with 4gb of ram with an intel x25-m and the mbp with the ssd still feels faster than my mac pro setup!

Sorry for the double post.

 

[jedidove]

In your case the 8gb of ram would be the luxury item. The SSD these days have a much greater impact than 8gb of ram. If I were you, I would just keep the 4gb of ram stock and save your parents the $1200 and wait until the prices come down (and they will come down).

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403 This is the ssd drive I just ordered and check out the review.

All reviews I've seen so far, say the ssd made the biggest impact in performances. Even upgrading to an SSD drive (in this case the intel x25-m) had even a far more performance jump than upgrading the whole system to the nehalem i7.

It just shows you that the hdd is the huge bottleneck when it comes to the already very fast cpu + gpu combinations out there.

In some tests, reviewers stuck the intel x25-m SSD drive in a 4-5 year old laptop and it sprung back to life and was fast as the quad core desktops~!

Unfortunately, if I don't get the 8gb upgrade, I'll wind up dishing out the cash for the RAM upgrade later. With no other gifts, I can swindle an expensive laptop, but I'm not gonna get an almost as expensive laptop and an upgrade down the road. As a broke college student, I'm gonna take as much help as I can get lol. Last time I made the mistake of not maxing out RAM and sooner than I thought I could barely run new games.



Back on topic though, anyone have any idea if this is indeed a samsung ssd? Or can anyone atleast confirm that the SSD's in the 15in are samsung?

 

[Michael CM1]

Where do you people get $900 extra to buy a smaller hard drive? I get that they're supposedly faster, but I wouldn't shell out that much for a very new technology. I'm waiting for that stuff to come down to maybe 125% of the HDD price.

For all the "bag of hurt" that Blu-ray is, it wouldn't cost an extra $900/system, yet those darn SSDs are available with every Mac notebook and Blu-ray is not an option on anything.

 

[jedidove]

For all the "bag of hurt" that Blu-ray is, it wouldn't cost an extra $900/system, yet those darn SSDs are available with every Mac notebook and Blu-ray is not an option on anything.

Don't remind me :/

 

[xoggyux]

I would say just wait a bit, in flash memory the price halves every 6-12months. Wait a bit more.
In the other hand you can get a relatively small SDD card (64gb) for system and programs only (that should be more than enough) then when you are at home, you can have one of those external HDD that comes with 500gb for $100 and doesnt need external power supply (just usb) so you can save all your pictures, videos, music there. I know the ideal would be an internal one (such as SDD + HDD until SDD are very cheap) but its a damn laptop you cannot just keep adding stuff to it.

Where do you people get $900 extra to buy a smaller hard drive? I get that they're supposedly faster, but I wouldn't shell out that much for a very new technology. I'm waiting for that stuff to come down to maybe 125% of the HDD price.

For all the "bag of hurt" that Blu-ray is, it wouldn't cost an extra $900/system, yet those darn SSDs are available with every Mac notebook and Blu-ray is not an option on anything.

What do you want Blue ray anyway? we should have got rid of optical technology a while ago not try to improve it!. Adding more density just makes it easier to lose your data with the slightest scratch.

 

[jjahshik32]

Where do you people get $900 extra to buy a smaller hard drive? I get that they're supposedly faster, but I wouldn't shell out that much for a very new technology. I'm waiting for that stuff to come down to maybe 125% of the HDD price.

For all the "bag of hurt" that Blu-ray is, it wouldn't cost an extra $900/system, yet those darn SSDs are available with every Mac notebook and Blu-ray is not an option on anything.

The intel x25-m SSD costed me $499 with 80gb of space. But seriously if you upgrade the ram to 8gb say 8-9 months later, it'll probably come down to around $450 as to the $1200 now.

 

[cherry su]

The intel x25-m SSD costed me $499 with 80gb of space. But seriously if you upgrade the ram to 8gb say 8-9 months later, it'll probably come down to around $450 as to the $1200 now.

seeing the outstanding reviews the intel ssd has garnered, i second (third) the motion to get an intel drive (over the samsung)

 

[jjahshik32]

Unfortunately, if I don't get the 8gb upgrade, I'll wind up dishing out the cash for the RAM upgrade later. With no other gifts, I can swindle an expensive laptop, but I'm not gonna get an almost as expensive laptop and an upgrade down the road. As a broke college student, I'm gonna take as much help as I can get lol. Last time I made the mistake of not maxing out RAM and sooner than I thought I could barely run new games.



Back on topic though, anyone have any idea if this is indeed a samsung ssd? Or can anyone atleast confirm that the SSD's in the 15in are samsung?

RAM is not as important as you think under windows to run games. Running 4GB of RAM as to 8GB of RAM is not going to make much of a difference as 2GB of RAM compared to 4GB of RAM.

Anyway, if you wait 8 more months or so that $1200 price tag of RAM will come down significantly as it always does and probably cost around $450-$500 then.

As for SSD, it is still moving slow, not as fast as people think. By sometime next year the same intel x25-m SSD drive that I bought for $499 (still think its more than reasonable to pay that much for the amount of performance gain that I got) will probably reduce to $249 and the newly released 160gb (I think its been released this month that cost $1100 at most places) will come down to the $499 (same price as the current 80gb intel x25-m).

Either way, for $499 I'll still be using my ultrafast SSD drive for a few more years and at $499 its not like I lost an arm and a leg as to the 8GB of RAM that cost $1200 that will forsure get significant reduction in price later this year (which wouldnt make that much of a performance gain anyway).

I came from a 2.8ghz 8 core mac pro with 16GB of RAM with a 150gb raptor hdd as my main boot device (this was 6 months ago). I sold this setup off then to wait for nehalem but after the intel x25-m SSD drive upgrade to my notebook, I feel like its even faster than that setup! I'm not exaggerating one bit, at times I feel like I have my mac pro setup back but then realize applications pop up 2x faster than I can remember.

At the time when I had the mac pro setup, I thought 16GB of ram would allow me to do insane amount of heavy multitasking but the hdd was still the bottleneck and the 16GB of ram was barely used most of the time. I usually got just around 4gb of ram used most of the time but with HD rendering and other things have gotten the use of 11GB at max. I would love to try this intel SSD on that same mac pro configuration though but I will wait for nehalem.

All I have to say that in the last 15 years THE best upgrade I have ever made was to move to an SSD drive. All these years upgrading to totally newer architecture CPU + GPU didnt have much of an impact in the overall speed as it does with this intel x25-m.

I can run vmware fusion, 15 apps, 20+ pages of safari tabs, ichat, iphoto, unison downloading 20+gb, transmission uploading, using 6 spaces runs really really silky smooth with no interference of bumps along the way with my fast mutitasking. Even windows vmware fusion suspends in mere 3 seconds and loads up in about another 3-4 seconds as well! I remember with the 7200rpm hdd I had to wait 15 seconds or so and took forever to load. Windows via vmware fusion runs like its native with no more color wheels inbetween while multitasking!

Even safari pages doesnt have that half a second lag (I'm guessing caching is even quicker) the webpages loads instantly as I had this problem with my hitachi travelstar 7k200 hdd. After I clear the cache on safari, later on the heavy demanding pages and with more than 7-8 tabs open it would lag changing between the tags and loading webpages too, lots of half second hiccups.

Now it feels like I have a totally new beast and even reviewers say that upgrading to the intel x25-m has a much significant boost in performance than even moving up to a nehalem i7! They put this intel x25-m ssd drive in an 4 year old laptop which felt the same speed as the newer quad 2.66ghz desktop system with a raptor!

 

[frimple]

Back on topic though, anyone have any idea if this is indeed a samsung ssd? Or can anyone atleast confirm that the SSD's in the 15in are samsung?

AFAIK Apple uses the MTRON SSD's. Like an above poster I recently bought 4 X25-M's and they're super sweet. I've read favorable reviews of the MTRON's but I have yet to see a comparo between the Intel and MTRON drives. I believe the advertised speed of the MTRON's is ~100Mb read/~80Mb write


EDIT:

Also there is an upgrade to a 7200 RPM drive on the Mac Pro 17"

 

[Niiro13]

I highly doubt it.

SuperTalent already has a 256GB SSD out and OCZ has a 250 GB one out...

OCZ's is about $900.

Samsung's SSD is claiming that it's almost as fast as 15K HDD? There's no way that it's only gonna be $900 in that case...

 

[jedidove]

seeing the outstanding reviews the intel ssd has garnered, i second (third) the motion to get an intel drive (over the samsung)

Look at the post above this one and say that again. This samsung is supposed to really kick ass. I just wish they would release a price on it already...

 

[jjahshik32]

Look at the post above this one and say that again. This samsung is supposed to really kick ass. I just wish they would release a price on it already...

yea so far itts <b>supposed</b> to kick ass just with a faster write speed of 160 mb/s.

The intel x25-m already has a 230 mb/s real world read speed but the write speed is at a constant 79 mb/s (which still isnt too bad but is still a little bit faster than a velociraptor).

All the SSD drives so far have a read and write that they said they could achieve but the only SSD on the market currently that actually meets the real world benches is the intel x25-m.

We'll just have to wait and see if samsung's claims of 220 mb/s read and especially 200 mb/s lives up to it.

But the ones I'm really anticipating are the sandisks with very low cost.

 

[Niiro13]

i think the buzz about Samsung is that even though the Intel performs faster than the Samsung, the Samsung is 256GB whilst the Intel is still 160GB?

 

[jjahshik32]

i think the buzz about Samsung is that even though the Intel performs faster than the Samsung, the Samsung is 256GB whilst the Intel is still 160GB?

No, the new samsung is supposed to have 220 mb/s of read and 200 mb/s of write for an MLC SSD. The 256gb of space is also very nice as well. But we'll have to see the real world tests once these get into people's hands.

I guess the 17" mbp buyers who opt for the 256gb SSD will have to test it out for us. Probably bearfeats will do it.

I have a strong sense that these speed claims will not be very accurate probably more like 160 mb/s read and 100 mb/s write at best. Even SLC SSDs doesnt get the type of speeds that samsung is claiming.

 

[Niiro13]

I'm hoping they aren't accurate...then I can go and get a 15" now and not regret the 17" .

But like I said, i doubt that's the one. There's no way it would be near $900 (even if Apple decided to discount it).

 

[pacome]

I guess the 17" mbp buyers who opt for the 256gb SSD will have to test it out for us. Probably bearfeats will do it.

I ordered the 17" MBP with 256GB SSD two days ago for my company. I will test the hard drive as soon as I get it (4 or 6 weeks to wait... maybe too long...)

 

[8767092]

AFAIK Apple uses the MTRON SSD's.

As far as my Macbook Pro is concerned the 128GB Apple SSD in it is made by Samsung unless Samsung has sneakily been putting a big Samsung logo across MTRON brand SSDs.

 

[jedidove]

I'm hoping they aren't accurate...then I can go and get a 15" now and not regret the 17" .

But like I said, i doubt that's the one. There's no way it would be near $900 (even if Apple decided to discount it).

Actually, I've seen a few articles saying that this drive won't be too expensive (see http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/05/25/samsung.256gb.ssd/). Supposedly MLC is cheaper to produce than SLC. That combined with the post above me (128gb samsung in MBP) is strongly tempting me to have hope that this will be the samsung drive. Like niiro said, sure the intel is fast but does it store 256gb? I can't even find the 160gb version anywhere. There are always external drives but it is nice to have a big chunk of storage on the laptop itself that you can carry around.