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Faster NAND Flash (SSD) in Late 2008

wizard said:
. . . t what is really needed is an update to the Touch and iPhone. These are the devices that cry out for more Flash right now.

Dave
Click to expand...

agreed,

luckily my Sprint contract is up in November, just in time for a 64 GB SSD iPhone at MW '09
 
well glad to see the prices are dropping on the current SSD drives. the newer, faster drives that are coming - seems it will be awhile before we'll see them in a Macbook Air. only 8GB coming this year, and i'm sure will be pricey.
 
dual64bit said:
In today's world, as companies come out with higher capacity HDD, consumers seem to be finding more and more ways to fill them up. Therefore, I think it would be difficult for SSD to be the standard in 2-3 years. I can see companies making the standard a 32Gb SSD (os load) and secondary 500+gb HDD a standard. People need 250Gb today, 500Gb by the end of the year, and will require 1Tb by the end of 2009 just to do their "everyday" computing. It will be hard for SSD to keep up with the capacities. Again, as I mentioned would be nice if SSD is adopted as a startup disk-type standard.
Click to expand...

I totally agree as well. I would love to see flash but as long as I keep seeing hard drives get so big, why would I want to reduce myself to something so small and confining? Especially when I am a video guy. And it is great that Apple pushes toward the future, but you'd think they would get this too being that they are now trying to lead the digital movie era which is going to seriously bump up peoples storage needs as they move their their digital lives and media to digital. Hard drives are going to be around for a quite a while yet!
 
What if they used these SSDs for the OS and like RAM to keep commonly used things in faster access? Maybe they could even replace the RAM. Is that possible or plausible?
 
current MBA 1.8in SSD 64 gig drives run for about 1,600 retail....so while i am sure it will come down in price, i don't see it being less than half in a year. apple most definitely gets a discount on their mass ordering of these drives
 
Cybergypsy said:
Thats one reason I waited on the macbook air ssd, they will grow larger and cheaper soon
Click to expand...

I don't see the SSD going down in price where it will be within reach for the average consumer anytime soon. At best a 64GB SSD will go down in price by 50% in a year. And at half the cost at what it's being offered in the BTO now, I still don't think many people will be running to their apple store to snatch up an MBA. Don't get me wrong, I would love an affordable SSD sooner than later, but I think it will be more than a year before it becomes "affordable".
 
ghettobird said:
I don't see the SSD going down in price where it will be within reach for the average consumer anytime soon. At best a 64GB SSD will go down in price by 50% in a year. And at half the cost at what it's being offered in the BTO now, I still don't think many people will be running to their apple store to snatch up an MBA. Don't get me wrong, I would love an affordable SSD sooner than later, but I think it will be more than a year before it becomes "affordable".
Click to expand...

I agree with you almost completely... however, one area of computing that has become more affordable over the years is memory. While RAM is not the same as a SSD, just look at the drop in RAM and Flash memory over the last few years. This is why I was able to put 4 GB in my iMac and MBP. I would love a SSD, and am hoping for that "50%" reduction in price that seems to be the sweet spot for adoption (at least for me 🙂
 
price

Whether It is SSD or HDD, the reality is that the price of Macbook Pro and Macbook Air are far from the reach of a common man.😡

Sachin
 
Despite the mediocre Air SSD, The future of SSDs looks bright

Although I still love it, the macbook Air SSD somewhat disappoints/ Although I acknowledge that a compromise was necessary for costs, heat, and power consumption, the speed seems pretty slow. If I were to purchase one, I'd buy the HDD and replace it with a faster 1.8" SSD.

Anyways, there have been tons of announcements in the recent months about new SSDs with very fast speeds, and these are all before this new Intel/Micron announcement about this new 5X faster flash technology.
This macrumors article talks about the speed limitations of existing NAND flash, but I'm assuming that is only per chip, and the chips can work in parallel in something like a RAID setup. I don't know the architecture details of how SSD are made, but I know they are alot faster than the numbers given for existing NAND flash in this article.

When looking at SSD speed figures, you obviously should look at legitimate benchmarks to confirm the manufacturers speed claims, but the few test's I have seen have indicated that manufacturers numbers are usually pretty close to tested speeds aka 5-10% error.

Here are some test results from tomshardware.com on some SSDs they have reviewed:

(http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/12/17/solid_state_drives/page7.html)

MTron SSD 32GB
95 MB/s sequential read
75 MB/s sequential write

Sandisk SSD6000 32GB
68MB/s sequential read
47MB/s sequential write

... these drives really are very fast. Seemingly much faster than the drive put in the Macbook Air. So those of you out there discouraged by the Macbook Air results, I think the future shall be bright. 🙂
Below I put some of the recent press release numbers I gathered from tgdaily, wikipedia, etc

MTron 1.8"/2.5"
100MB/s sequential read
80MB/s sequential write

SuperTalent 2.5"
60MB/s sequential read
45MB/s sequential write

PNY 1.8"/2.5"
66MB/s sequential read
50MB/s sequential write

BitMicro 2.5"
"100MB/s+"

Pretec
68MB/s sequential read
40MB/s sequential write

A-Data
"62MB/s"

Ridata
60 MB/s sequential read
48 MB/s sequential write

Samsung 1.8"/2.5"
64MB/s sequential read
45MB/s sequential write

Samsung NEW SATAII 1.8"/2.5"
120MB/s sequential read
100MB/s sequential write

Adtron 2.5"
" in the 70MB/s range"

Toshiba 1.8"
100MB/s sequential read
40MB/s sequential write
 
dual64bit said:
In today's world, as companies come out with higher capacity HDD, consumers seem to be finding more and more ways to fill them up. Therefore, I think it would be difficult for SSD to be the standard in 2-3 years. I can see companies making the standard a 32Gb SSD (os load) and secondary 500+gb HDD a standard. People need 250Gb today, 500Gb by the end of the year, and will require 1Tb by the end of 2009 just to do their "everyday" computing. It will be hard for SSD to keep up with the capacities. Again, as I mentioned would be nice if SSD is adopted as a startup disk-type standard.
Click to expand...

In the near term, yes.

In the long term - hard drive capacities are increasing slower than SSD capacities, and at some point SSD capacities will overtake standard platter based hard drive capacities. Yeah, it will be for an initial price premium but it seems that the speed will be worthwhile. I expect this to happen in 2010 or 2011 for 2.5" laptop drives (512GB SSDs for $999 in 2010). To be honest anyone that stores all their data on their laptop is a bit strange, but it is nice to carry a copy of your music and video libraries around with you (and it is only the latter that is using up loads of space these days). For laptops a 128GB SSD for <$150 in 2010 may prove to be very attractive.

In desktops having startup SSD is a nice idea, and you certainly don't need as much space then (well, Windows might, considering the file splunging that applications do there, but they already have the technology within the OS, it's just been waiting for faster and better connected flash memory). I actually think that 3.5" hard drives may come with a 8-32GB "most used files" flash cache, as SATA can handle 300MB/s.
 
wizard said:
In any event what is really needed is an update to the Touch and iPhone. These are the devices that cry out for more Flash right now.

Dave
Click to expand...

Aaggghhh - I'd just about persuaded myself to buy a Touch (because Apple refuses to release the damned MPB update) and there's no iPhone in Singapore and I'm not even sure I'm going for it when there is and now you just made me think ... hang on ... perhaps there's a bigger touch coming and now I can't buy anything again.

😀
 
winterspan said:
Although I still love it, the macbook Air SSD disappoints for $999. Although I acknowledge that a compromise was necessary for costs, heat, and power consumption, the speed seems pretty slow. If I were to purchase one, I'd buy the HDD and replace it with a faster 1.8" SSD, maybe even a 64GB one. There are many 32GB SSD's on the market for about $500.. So seems like the Air SSD is sort of a rip-off.
Click to expand...

If Apple sold you a 32 GB SSD disk for $999, that might be called a rip-off, but they sell you 64 GB. Please show us where you can find one cheaper, or where you can find a comparable laptop cheaper.

And when you compare the read/write speeds, you should remember that it is usually very very hard to have a drive that is faster in real life than another hard drive in a brochure or in the manufacturer's marketing information. It's very easy to print "75 MB/s" in a brochure. It is much harder to actually achieve it.
 
who cares!?

why do they keep designing these rubbish 8gb and 16gb flash drives, the speed is fast enough we need SPACE

then they start bringing out reasonably priced 120gb + flash drives il be interested...
 
lol

rols said:
Aaggghhh - I'd just about persuaded myself to buy a Touch (because Apple refuses to release the damned MPB update) and there's no iPhone in Singapore and I'm not even sure I'm going for it when there is and now you just made me think ... hang on ... perhaps there's a bigger touch coming and now I can't buy anything again.

😀
Click to expand...

noooo, dude if you think like that youl never EVER buy an aplle product...lol there alwasy doing it...annoying i no. only got my pro about 5 months ago...and guess what, new one coming out any week now.
 
Eidorian said:
Still not worth it to me at that price. As much as I want more drive space in my MacBook, I haven't used more then 45 GB of my ~115 GB.
Click to expand...

Same for me as well, but I am not counting Application/Program Support space. On my 120 GB I have about 30 GB used, but I have close to 60 or 70GBs of space taken up by Adobe CS3/Final Cut Pro Aperture and an assortment of other applications including the OS of course. This is my main reason for wanting the next 17" MBP to include dual internal HDDs in some way, shape, or form. Or for the OEM to create a bootable Express Card drive that I can stick in my EC slot and boot from, leaving the second drive for just scratch and Application Support.

I know that the second one is more likely.

As for Apple lowering the prices on SSDs in the future, I don't think it will happen to the extent we hope for. I had a deep conversation with my GF about the MacBook Air, and she is still eyeballing it but she knows that SSD is possibly the way to go since she is a road warrior/teacher. I can see Apple dropping $200 off of the current SSD for the MBA but not until they make the revision B model. It will stay pretty close to the $1000 that it is now for a while.

And yes... I'd rather see faster higher capacity 2.5" drives than anything else right now. I hope that some HD company gives us a 250GB or 320GB 7200 rpm drive by years end.
 
There are two fronts on the flash war - the first front is lower performance high capacity flash, the kind used in portable media players, iPhones, etc. The writeup mentions much lower prices which is great, as I expect a 16GB iPhone now with the SDK.

The other front is the higher performance. This is where things will change - imagine database servers, providing mostly read-only data to a webserver. If the drive has read speeds of over 120MB/s and consumes less power and generating less heat than a 15k SCSI drive, its a huge win all around.

What I'll be curious to see is how far the SSD folks will take the speed competition. Do we see 300MB/s read/write speeds in 2010? If so then some people will fork out the dough regardless of price. Imagine the boot times! Or dont bother booting at all and just hibernate, writing 2GB of RAM out to a drive at 300MB/s wold be fairly fast.
 
SirOmega said:
There are two fronts on the flash war - the first front is lower performance high capacity flash, the kind used in portable media players, iPhones, etc. The writeup mentions much lower prices which is great, as I expect a 16GB iPhone now with the SDK.

The other front is the higher performance. This is where things will change - imagine database servers, providing mostly read-only data to a webserver. If the drive has read speeds of over 120MB/s and consumes less power and generating less heat than a 15k SCSI drive, its a huge win all around.

What I'll be curious to see is how far the SSD folks will take the speed competition. Do we see 300MB/s read/write speeds in 2010? If so then some people will fork out the dough regardless of price. Imagine the boot times! Or dont bother booting at all and just hibernate, writing 2GB of RAM out to a drive at 300MB/s wold be fairly fast.
Click to expand...

This is the current dichotomy of storage now. Even with laptops we have a choice, either a 320GB 5400 rpm drive, or a 200GB 7200 rpm drive. Speed or capacity. The interesting thing would be to see if manufacturers can give us even smaller laptop drives, that have roughly the same capacity or speed. I have been dreaming of ways Apple can stick two drives in the 17" for a while now.
 
Use of the express slot

i wonder why more manufacrurers are not making use of the express slot on mbp - it may not be the most universal format but for those of us not interested in slicing open our lappies - i can not see how for reasonable performance it would be trouble. I saw trancends offerinf and is to me a glorified memory card
 
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