How does 768GB SSD work?

[bniu]

Apple has always used SSDs that came in powers of 2. So what's the deal with 768?

I think for a 256GB SSD, you'd have 16 16GB chips and for a 512GB SSD, you'd have 16 32GB chips. So how do you make a 768GB SSD, 8 32GB chips and 8 64 GB chips? What would then prevent you from making a 1TB SSD?

 

[fizzwinkus]

Probably because they didn't want to break $4,500+ on the top line model. That's so high I doubt there are enough who would spring for it to make the additional supply and integration into manufacturing worthwhile.

Just my off the top of my head guess though.

 

[KylePowers]

Apple has always used SSDs that came in powers of 2. So what's the deal with 768?

I think for a 256GB SSD, you'd have 16 16GB chips and for a 512GB SSD, you'd have 16 32GB chips. So how do you make a 768GB SSD, 8 32GB chips and 8 64 GB chips? What would then prevent you from making a 1TB SSD?

Any combination would work. The only thing preventing it would be space, more than likely.

 

[edk99]

a 1024 gb ssd would be way to expensive so they made a 768gb one

Going from the 512 to the 768 one is $500. If apple would of gone from 512 to 1024 it would of been probably $1000. Way to much.

 

[50thVert]

Apple has always used SSDs that came in powers of 2. So what's the deal with 768?

I think for a 256GB SSD, you'd have 16 16GB chips and for a 512GB SSD, you'd have 16 32GB chips. So how do you make a 768GB SSD, 8 32GB chips and 8 64 GB chips? What would then prevent you from making a 1TB SSD?

Price prevents you from making the 1TB SSD.

I'm actually more interested to see if there's a performance hit to the 768GB SSD due to the controller having to interleave I/O at different levels across half the NAND.

 

[88 King]

Since the retina mbp is aimed at professionals, I wonder why Apple did not choose RAID0 setup with two ssd. With RAID 0 you double the read and write speed close to 1 GBps with noticeable speed increase for heavy photo and video editing. Plus Apple could include 1TB option and reduce the cost for 256GB and 512GB options.

I know people will say things like higher frailer rate and more ware on the ssd, but ssd and RAID technology are mature enough for Apple to offer it on their flagship product.

 

[calderone]

Since the retina mbp is aimed at professionals, I wonder why Apple did not choose RAID0 setup with two ssd. With RAID 0 you double the read and write speed close to 1 GBps with noticeable speed increase for heavy photo and video editing. Plus Apple could include 1TB option and reduce the cost for 256GB and 512GB options.

I know people will say things like higher frailer rate and more ware on the ssd, but ssd and RAID technology are mature enough for Apple to offer it on their flagship product.

This is pretty silly.

 

[jcpb]

Since the retina mbp is aimed at professionals, I wonder why Apple did not choose RAID0 setup with two ssd. With RAID 0 you double the read and write speed close to 1 GBps with noticeable speed increase for heavy photo and video editing. Plus Apple could include 1TB option and reduce the cost for 256GB and 512GB options.

I know people will say things like higher frailer rate and more ware on the ssd, but ssd and RAID technology are mature enough for Apple to offer it on their flagship product.

I don't think Apple has an OS X version of Intel's latest RST drivers to enable TRIM under RAID 0, let alone bother with such a setup.

Losing reliability in exchange of increasing sequential performance to 800-1000 MB/s (when most people wouldn't see any benefit) is a bad tradeoff. Current SSDs are already limited by SATA3, putting them in RAID 0 does little. It would be better to just migrate the entire drive interface to PCI-Express.

 

[50thVert]

Since the retina mbp is aimed at professionals, I wonder why Apple did not choose RAID0 setup with two ssd. With RAID 0 you double the read and write speed close to 1 GBps with noticeable speed increase for heavy photo and video editing. Plus Apple could include 1TB option and reduce the cost for 256GB and 512GB options.

I know people will say things like higher frailer rate and more ware on the ssd, but ssd and RAID technology are mature enough for Apple to offer it on their flagship product.

RAID 0 is a HUGE no-no for anything sold to consumers, especially the boot drive. Not everyone uses backups and an outage would certainly upset a lot of people.