Faster NAND Flash (SSD) in Late 2008

[hiptobesquare]

Will SSD survive, or will the physical format change?

I completely love the idea of solid-state non-moving storage.

I just wonder about the enclosure. Why does NAND require a hard drive style enclosure?

Even if they keep to the SATA or PATA, or whatever drive standard, why not have a PCB storage controller card, with replaceable memory module cards?

Why should it be all enclosed in cast aluminum or sheetmetal, or whatever, just to fit current HD size requirements? I understand the backward compatibility now, as SSDs come on line, but in the future, why not just have it as a daughter card, without all the packaging, and dead weight?

iPods, and iPhone are already there, although they are soldered on, and not replaceable or upgradeable. (which would be a cool feature, btw...)

The iPod Touch especially, but all of the flash iPods would have to be thicker and heavier if they had hard drive casings inside, wrapped around their NAND memory.

Shed the shell, and make it modular, somewhat like RAM, even if it uses an internal SATA connection, or whatever.

 

[Digital Skunk]

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

Agreed. I looked at Trancend's and Lexar's options and both models just seemed to be larger flash cards with just about the same or slower write and read speeds. I have read some reviews and many say that it's not something you could boot off of or even use as a scratch disk, the read/write is just too slow.

 

[EagerDragon]

BREAKING NEWS: Samsung in 2020 will release 100TB flash NAND drive with the search speed of 1tb per second.

more news to follow in 2019.

LOL, by them I will be retired so waiting for the disk wont be an issue.

 

[ncbill]

It is going to be some time before SSD prices fall to anywhere near those of a standard 2.5" hard drive.

A 128GB 2.5" SSD is still well over $3,000 retail - I don't see how shrinking that to a 1.8" format will make it any cheaper.

Sometime in 2009 I can see Apple offering a 128GB SSD for the same $999 it now charges for the 64GB.

Meanwhile, a 320GB 2.5" USB external hard drive will currently cost you about $200 shipped.

And I'm sure there will be a 500GB model for the same price by the end of this year.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

It is going to be some time before SSD prices fall to anywhere near those of a standard 2.5" hard drive.

A 128GB 2.5" SSD is still well over $3,000 retail - I don't see how shrinking that to a 1.8" format will make it any cheaper.

Sometime in 2009 I can see Apple offering a 128GB SSD for the same $999 it now charges for the 64GB.

Meanwhile, a 320GB 2.5" USB external hard drive will currently cost you about $200 shipped.

And I'm sure there will be a 500GB model for the same price by the end of this year.

Newegg has a 320 2.5 external for $168.99, but why bother when a 1TB external ranges from $150 to $250.

These SSD drives make more sense on small scale devices and until they come up with a RAM interface daughter card that houses all the SSD chips and allow it to be easily upgradable, by the consumer, I don't see this taking over even today's drives.

 

[StevieMooey]

SSD Buyers Guide

People interested in SSD might find this a useful resource:

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-buyers-guide.html


2.5 inch model directory:

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-2p5.html


-Mooey

 

[ionos]

Can't the sizes be custom?

Who says with this new tech that we have to still be bound to existing sizes of HDD's? Can't a new standard be made since this kind of is a new tech and we don't actually have to subscribe to the old ways of doing things.

Shouldn't the Laptop manufacturers (like Apple) be able to come up with some new size (dimensionally) to fit new products and create a new standard?

 

[Digital Skunk]

And I'm sure there will be a 500GB model for the same price by the end of this year.

I have been a little laxed in my research but I wet myself when I saw that Hitachi made a 500GB 2.5" drive. It's fat but it's still 500GB. Can't wait for it to be sold to us poor schmucks and not the OEMs so that I can put them in my enclosures.

Also, I hope that Apple doesn't go slim on the MacBook Pros. I want one that's a little larger so that we can get some real performance and one of those Hitachi's in there. I am tired of buying a 17" mediocre consumer laptop, time for some real performance Apple!

Hitachi's Drive

 

[ncbill]

The 500GB Hitachi is 12.5mm - too tall to fit in recent notebooks.

The 500GB Samsung is 9.5mm - perfect for a MacBook, available in March.

EDIT: Samsung, not Seagate - my bad.

I have been a little laxed in my research but I wet myself when I saw that Hitachi made a 500GB 2.5" drive. It's fat but it's still 500GB. Can't wait for it to be sold to us poor schmucks and not the OEMs so that I can put them in my enclosures.

Also, I hope that Apple doesn't go slim on the MacBook Pros. I want one that's a little larger so that we can get some real performance and one of those Hitachi's in there. I am tired of buying a 17" mediocre consumer laptop, time for some real performance Apple!

Hitachi's Drive

 

[Digital Skunk]

The 500GB Seagate is 9.5mm - perfect for a MacBook, available in March.

Even better

 

[Eidorian]

The 500GB Hitachi is 12.5mm - too tall to fit in recent notebooks.

The 500GB Seagate is 9.5mm - perfect for a MacBook, available in March.

The

Thanks for this information. Now I just need a reason to get this drive. I keep track of processors, chipsets, and video cards. Sadly I don't do the same for hard drives.

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.

Professional applications, iLife, and my music are taking up most of my laptop's drive space.

I don't expect Apple's usage of SSD to really drop in price BTO or influence the market in general.

Greetings as always.

 

[barefeats]

I have some benchmark data on the MacBook Air SSD

I'm testing the MacBook Air with the SSD. I was interested in the random read and write speed since that predicts, IMHO, how good of a boot drive it would make. I used QuickBench 4.0's small random read/write test (4K to 1MB block sizes). I wanted to compare it to two popular 2.5 inch MacBook Pro drives. Here's what I learned:

MacBook Air 64GB SSD = 35MB/s READ, 16MB/s WRITE
250GB 5400RPM Hitachi = 13MB/s READ, 12MB/s WRITE
200GB 7200RPM Hitachi = 16MB/s READ, 18MB/s WRITE

It gets better. The MBP drives were empty. My SSD drive (55GB formatted) is 31% full. And in past testing when those drives get 90% full, the speed drops in half. The flash based SDD will still be cranking along at the same speed when it's 90% full.

 

[winterspan]

Will SSD survive, or will the physical format change?

I completely love the idea of solid-state non-moving storage.

I just wonder about the enclosure. Why does NAND require a hard drive style enclosure?

Even if they keep to the SATA or PATA, or whatever drive standard, why not have a PCB storage controller card, with replaceable memory module cards?

Why should it be all enclosed in cast aluminum or sheetmetal, or whatever, just to fit current HD size requirements? I understand the backward compatibility now, as SSDs come on line, but in the future, why not just have it as a daughter card, without all the packaging, and dead weight?

iPods, and iPhone are already there, although they are soldered on, and not replaceable or upgradeable. (which would be a cool feature, btw...)

The iPod Touch especially, but all of the flash iPods would have to be thicker and heavier if they had hard drive casings inside, wrapped around their NAND memory.

Shed the shell, and make it modular, somewhat like RAM, even if it uses an internal SATA connection, or whatever.

Thats a great point!! The 1.8"/2.5"/3.5" makes sense now from the standpoint of backwards design compatibility, but I agree that they should definitely look into alternative form factors. We all know what computer manufacturer would push for it first!

I'm not an engineer, but I imagine it would be quite a large engineering project to make a "RAM" type expandable SSD. I've been looking at HDD and SSD architectures and trying to understand how something like this could work. It seems like it would be very difficult to have a SSD/flash controller system that could be flexible enough to allow plug-in "storage modules" to increase capacity, while at the same time being optimized for performance, reliability, etc. And how would it affect the "index/contents" area of the drive when it gets expanded. I would assume you would have to format everything, unless they could make some kind of hot-plugin RAID type controller.

Ah... enough babbling, we need someone with indepth knowledge of HDD/SSD tech to comment. Anyone wanna jump in?

oh and I'm not sure that the manufacturers would necessarily like a plug-in expandability SSD system as you would surely spend less money when upgrading!

 

[winterspan]

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

Not so at all. It really has to do with priorities... spending $2000 every 3 years or so really isn't all that much to an average $60,000 2 income household. Especially with the amount of $35-40K+ SUVs I see out driving around.
And anyone under 35 probably spends a Macbook Pro's worth of money each year just in drinks when going out on the weekends.

If you compare to people's hobbys:
Outdoors types buy $5,000+ Jet Skis, $5,000+ motorcycles / dirtbikes / four-wheelers
Skiers/Snowboarders spend $1,000 a year on lift tickets, fuel, and equipment.
People who like fishing buy $1,000s of dollars of equipment and $15-20K boats.
Gamers spend $1,000s on new computers, graphic cards, games, etc
Hunters spend thousands of dollars in guns, ammunition, travel, etc.
People who ride horses spend $2-5K on a horse plus $300/mo+ just feeding and sheltering the thing
....

 

[winterspan]

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.

1) Yes, I made a mistake about the 64GB Macbook Air drive. The price is good.

2) If you read my whole post, you would see that I specifically pointed out that you can't necessarily trust manufacturer's numbers. However, I provided benchmark results from tomshardware that showed the SSDs they did test were very close to their manufacturer's claimed numbers. I am currently working to gather more benchmarks, but take a look at some of these numbers...

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

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

etc....

 

[rols]

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.

and for once I made the right choice. I waited and now I can buy a bigger touch