Not speaking for everyone else, my only reply to your statements before was that you were making it sound like everyone needs massive hard drives. I pointed out that (I'm making up numbers here but I would guess) less than 5% of apple users require that type of storage so hard drives will become very uncommon for average consumer computers over the next few years. Never meant to seem like hard drives would cease to exist.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Faster 'NVM Express' SSD Interface Arrives on Retina MacBook and OS X 10.10.3
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Not speaking for everyone else, my only reply to your statements before was that you were making it sound like everyone needs massive hard drives. I pointed out that (I'm making up numbers here but I would guess) less than 5% of apple users require that type of storage so hard drives will become very uncommon for average consumer computers over the next few years. Never meant to seem like hard drives would cease to exist.
someone posted in the comments section of an article: Intel has some awesome new NVM Express SSDs for the PC. The 750 Series gets 2400MB/s read and 1200MB/s write
is this accurate?
is this accurate?
Yep, I'd be hating life if HDD's disappeared and I had to buy SSD's for my media server
But thankful that they've gotten cheap enough and large enough that my gaming PC is able to run solely on SSD's, games included (I hate load times)
Couple thoughts... From most to least important...
It appears that series 9 chipsets are required on the motherboard for NVM support; obviously the new Broadwell refreshes (12" Macbook and the "new" Macbook Airs/13" Pros) have to use newer chipsets on the mobo to support Broadwell and thus support NVM. It would also appear that when Apple did their refresh this past year of the Haswell with slight CPU bumps (2014 models), they bumped the CPU only, not the motherboard thus anyone using something not bought in the past week ain't gonna get NVM support, ever (boo).
NVM Protocol overhaul will have more impact on latency and power efficiency though than throughput, very important, but having PCIe in itself is easily the bigger pole in the tent (vs SATA) for me as I push large photos, in RAW so throughput is of more importance than latency, but it's nice to see Apple supporting the latest and greatest hardware via their OS; I also suspect the "new" macbook air's and 13" pro and 12" macbook will see improved battery life vs non-NVM models; assuming the SSD is also NVM compliant, for all I know it isn't, but I suspect it is given the timing of both the OS update and product release.
I won't be going out and buying a new laptop because of NVM, however, it'll be a nice add-on technology when Apple adopts Skylake for the 2015 refresh of the 15" MBPRs... Skylake will have better power efficiency as it is, plus better GFX performance, and probably some minor CPU performance bump; NVM is another technological advancement in the name of better performance/efficiency.
I'm more excited over iOS9; Apple plans to do for iOS9 what they did for OS X with Mavericks (IE fix stuff and improve performance/efficiency without new features). Maybe new iOS devices will see NVM-like improvements too soon?
HDDs go away? No. HDD technology is still advancing, rapidly, in how much storage they can pack in a platter. HDDs will continue to be the archive medium of choice due to capacity and cost.
But as the primary HD for computers? Yeah, HDs are being replaced by SSDs, slowly though, despite the cost reduction and capacity increases on SSDs lately. Corporations still choose the most cost effective options for tech refreshes on desktops IE HDDs; but laptops they do choose SSDs due to battery life and both performance and capacity limitations within a 2.5" form factor vs a 3.5" with a desktop where battery doesn't matter, and 3.5"s have much better performance and capacity than their 2.5" counterparts...
It appears that series 9 chipsets are required on the motherboard for NVM support; obviously the new Broadwell refreshes (12" Macbook and the "new" Macbook Airs/13" Pros) have to use newer chipsets on the mobo to support Broadwell and thus support NVM. It would also appear that when Apple did their refresh this past year of the Haswell with slight CPU bumps (2014 models), they bumped the CPU only, not the motherboard thus anyone using something not bought in the past week ain't gonna get NVM support, ever (boo).
NVM Protocol overhaul will have more impact on latency and power efficiency though than throughput, very important, but having PCIe in itself is easily the bigger pole in the tent (vs SATA) for me as I push large photos, in RAW so throughput is of more importance than latency, but it's nice to see Apple supporting the latest and greatest hardware via their OS; I also suspect the "new" macbook air's and 13" pro and 12" macbook will see improved battery life vs non-NVM models; assuming the SSD is also NVM compliant, for all I know it isn't, but I suspect it is given the timing of both the OS update and product release.
I won't be going out and buying a new laptop because of NVM, however, it'll be a nice add-on technology when Apple adopts Skylake for the 2015 refresh of the 15" MBPRs... Skylake will have better power efficiency as it is, plus better GFX performance, and probably some minor CPU performance bump; NVM is another technological advancement in the name of better performance/efficiency.
I'm more excited over iOS9; Apple plans to do for iOS9 what they did for OS X with Mavericks (IE fix stuff and improve performance/efficiency without new features). Maybe new iOS devices will see NVM-like improvements too soon?
HDDs go away? No. HDD technology is still advancing, rapidly, in how much storage they can pack in a platter. HDDs will continue to be the archive medium of choice due to capacity and cost.
But as the primary HD for computers? Yeah, HDs are being replaced by SSDs, slowly though, despite the cost reduction and capacity increases on SSDs lately. Corporations still choose the most cost effective options for tech refreshes on desktops IE HDDs; but laptops they do choose SSDs due to battery life and both performance and capacity limitations within a 2.5" form factor vs a 3.5" with a desktop where battery doesn't matter, and 3.5"s have much better performance and capacity than their 2.5" counterparts...
Yes, for the 1.2TB version. The 400GB version gets 2,200MB/s read and 900MB/s write for $389.
The Samsung SM951 Apple uses in the new machines are just as fast though and saturate the 4x link speed at around 1500MB/s read and write.
spinning platters can't even replace tape backups because they are too expensive! Tape drives will never die.
In the two data centers I've worked at used to use tapes. Now they use numerous racks of HDDs for backups. It's amazing to see, and pretty fun to count how many PBs each rack holds.
Cool so not much gain from my 2015 samsung 256 not on NVMExpress
thanks for the info. Man some of you guys know your stuff.
Read the article then
----------
Newer tech. Why would you even expect your 2013 iMac to take advantage of tech just released in a newer computer?
Awesome:
Apple enables NVM Express protocol for faster SSD performance with OS X 10.10.3
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15...ol-for-faster-ssd-performance-with-os-x-10103
Apple enables NVM Express protocol for faster SSD performance with OS X 10.10.3
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15...ol-for-faster-ssd-performance-with-os-x-10103
Obviously you are having trouble reading for content. Floppy disks are as outmoded as your position on SSD. The application is exactly the same as hard drives that have been implemented in computers in the past.
My god man take a look in the mirror. I set my new MBP up for developmental work and I ended up using 20 GB more disk space than when I sat the old MBP up in 2008. The base install used a little over 100 GB of space. That includes space for on Linux VM which is more or less a base install. That leaves me with 400 GB of working space, that wont hold iTunes but it gives me a complete working computer installation suitable for a wide variety of work.
As far as a NAS solution I don't have one. If I did it would likely be for backups and thus wouldn't have to be significant larger than what would be required to backup all devices. If I set up a server to support Xcode that would certainly run on a Mac with a SSD.
The man is grossly out of touch in general.
What Deviant does seem to grasp is that the cost of a SSD is trivial. I've seen disk failures cost a company many thousands of dollar due to excessive down time. Then you have to consider the productivity increase that you get from actually using a SSD, the cost of an SSD is again trivial for professional users and easy to justify for consumers.
They are in fact dying out. Consider how many magnetic hard drives Apple now ships.
You are jumping to conclusion there.
A few years ago that might have been an acceptable position it isn't a given anymore and frankly tech is such that it won't even be considered in the future.
Beyond that there is one factor that you and deviant don't seem to consider and that is the cost of a hard drive crash.
Not as rapidly as affordable SSD technology. This is in a nut shell the basis of the argument that hard drives are dying.
As the capacity of flash technology increases the need to push out to rotating media diminishes significantly. Beyond that you miss the alternative solid state solutions that can replace those external rotating solutions. SD cards for example are often fast enough to serve as a secondary store.
As far a data centers go, SD's can be justified simply based on the power they save. Of course not all data centers are the same but your idea that the could is entirely rotating media needs to be reexamined.
Magnetic hard drives are a dying product. They will exist as a niche product sort of like film. The company that was Kodak recently agreed to continue making film for a few people in Hollywood, the fact that they did this doesn't mean that film is alive. It is effectively dead, the same thing will happen to magnetic disks, they will eventually wither and die while a few Luddites try to keep the industry alive.
Your wait is over. The company I work for has a multi-terabyte flash data array that we use to host databases used in a couple thousand user environment. Please take your own advice and then educate yourself here: http://www.purestorage.com
Well if everyone is going to just give partial answers lets throw another part out there: long term write longevity and write performance. Enterprise grade HDDs suffer from some mortality but have proven track records of very long time between failures. SSDs even with TRIM and extra block allocation still have a shorter write count life cycle. This is a big deal if you are constantly writing data.
So there are other reasons beside cost and absolute need for write speed that will keep HDDs alive in large data centers.
Traditional HDD's will continue to be the most practical mass storage media for the masses for a significant amount of time. For example, in the extreme case being discussed here, and assuming decent midrange drives, an SSD 50TB mass storage solution would cost approximately $20,000 for just the drives - hardly practical and most likely a ridiculous solution for anyone outside of the world's top 1% at the moment. Using traditional 4TB HDD's that same solution is about $1,500 for the drives. I guess for a big shot photographer in Dubai though, its worth it just to show off your bling SSD mass storage and back-up solution to your friends/colleagues?
Furthermore, USB 3.1 makes it painless to use traditional HDD's for private use as media library hubs (music, video, pictures) and Photos app/iTunes libraries.
Commercial Cloud services are also not going to be going SSD anytime soon, for the reasons stated above. There will literally be zero performance difference to the end user.
How you guys can suggest that the traditional HDD is going away anytime soon is a bit perplexing. As primary local system storage memory, yes absolutely, but that is pretty much the only use case where an SSD will completely displace the HDD in the short/medium term.
I thought this was the case, but the more I look into it, NVMe support could be enabled for other chipsets through an EFI update (which of course would be entirely dependent on Apple releasing said update). Of course that Mac would also need a PCIe SSD with an NVMe capable controller as well. That's really the stumbling point here. You can have a storage controller that supports both SATA and SAS drives, but a SATA drive connected to it will never be able to utilize the SAS protocol.
As for NVMe capable SSD's, I was under the impression that Intel was the only game in town with a client NVMe SSD right now, and it's strictly a desktop design due to form factor and power consumption (review here). Marvell, Samsung, SandForce (Seagate), OCZ (Toshiba), and Phison all have client NVMe controllers in the works, but none of them are available yet... Or so I thought. It appears that there is an NVMe capable version of the Samsung SM951 after all, and Ganesh T S over at Anandtech even received one recently inside an Intel NUC.
Since Apple recently switched to the SM951 for the MacBook Air/Pro (13-inch, Early 2015), one wonders whether or not those drives are in fact NVMe capable as well. Apparently the AHCI and NVMe versions of the SM951 can be identified by their model numbers which begin with MZ-HPVxxxx and MZ-VPVxxxx respectively. Of course Apple uses a module with a proprietary form factor, so the part numbers start with MZ-JPVxxxx instead, which is of no help to us at all. The controller on the Apple modules does bear the same die markings as the one on the standard AHCI MZ-HPVxxxx version, however, it's entirely possible that the only differences between the NVMe and AHCI versions lie in firmware.
I wouldn't hold my breath, but there is a slight chance. Then again, does NVMe even matter for the SM951?
And this is the crux of it. You may get improved performance consistency or small random access performance, but NVMe doesn't appear to bring a ton to the table when it comes to sequential speeds. This ain't worth crying over or upgrading just to have.
Apple IS shipping less HDD but is also consuming more than ever (see data centers). SDD are taking over the consumer market and being implemented somewhat in the data centers, but that capacity needed in data centers simply cannot be met by SSD's. As someone who works in storage industry, HDD's are not going away any time soon. We simply cannot produce enough to meet demand. Industry projections show that by 2017/2018 at the current rate of growth, data added will exceed manufacturing capacity.
As far as some of your other points, your taking the current trend of SSD's (lets say power consumption) and are comparing future SSD projections to current HDD. If you think HDD's are sitting still and that we aren't working of improvements to drive cost per GB down even further, you are very mistaken.
Just curious, but aren't SSDs using AHCI already fast enough that recent increases in performance are basically imperceptible? Will this NVM Express technology make a difference in day-to-day usage of your average consumer? If not, where will it make a difference?
So "IN GENERAL" how common are 50TB NAS boxes?
You know, the example you used as the reason SSDs were too expensive.
You seem quick to claim people don't know anything because they disagree with your point. It doesn't really work that way.
Your premise is what's wrong. You're assuming that because SSDs haven't completely replaced HDDs that it's not going to happen. The fact is that up until relatively recently, HDDs ruled everything. They'd replaced both tape drives and CDs/DVDs, and SSDs where just a gleam in engineer's eyes.
In a relatively short time frame shorter than it took for HDDs to impinge on tape systems SSDs have shown up in all the places that used to be HDD only. This story is showing yet another way in which SSDs are continuing to supplant HDDs. It's obvious that it's just a matter of time before SSDs will be cheaper than HDDs, and well before that SSDs will be dominant because of their better performance.
Re: nvmexpress.org
..." standardize the PCIe SSD interface."
So will I be able to buy a "stick" of PCIe SSD memory for my home-built Skylake-based desktop PC?
(I've given up all hope of ever being able to upgrade Apple's paper-thin anorexic laptops in the future)
..." standardize the PCIe SSD interface."
So will I be able to buy a "stick" of PCIe SSD memory for my home-built Skylake-based desktop PC?
(I've given up all hope of ever being able to upgrade Apple's paper-thin anorexic laptops in the future)
Last edited:
Just wanted to point out that the reason SSD have replaced HDD so quickly in the consumer market is because they are plug & play. Same interface both hardware and software wise. Absolutely no difference from the consumers perspective. Tape to HDD was a huge difference. There wasn't a common communication pathway. Also the form factor evolution from the fridge sized HDD to what you have in your laptop. So you need to give some credit and explanation of WHY SSD has been adopted so quickly and that is one major factor. Imagine how hard it'd be if it wasn't the same... It would possibly be like a USB vs Thunderbolt. The superior one doesn't always win.
As far as HDD being replaced eventually, I sure hope people realize that's for everything. SSD's will be replaced with whatever surpasses that. And then again, and again and again. All technology has a shelf life.