NEW MBP HD changeable?

[chostwales]

Hi All,

I'm looking at investing in a new Macbook Pro 15" Ret.

Now my biggest concern is the HD. More specifically, how customisable is it?

The reason why I ask this is the tasks I do scientifically go through a lot of Reads/Writes and have been known to wear out SSDs in about 6-12 months. Now knowing this fact, I noticed that the more recent macbook pro's do not have SATA SSD capability, but are PCI-e based.

I thought ho-hum.. not a problem, just a different interface to play with. Then I noticed that actually Apple have locked out 3rd party vendors forcing me to purchase HD's from them which I can see are MUCH more expensive (as expected to be honest) than other brands.

Is there a way around this? Or has apple stopped the days of customising and putting your own HD in a MBP over?

Cheers,

 

[cjmillsnun]

The rMBP also has USB3 and thunderbolt.

If you're putting that much stress on an SSD, then perhaps that isn't what you should be running it on. Can you not use an external HD?

Unfortunately there are no third party SSDs (yet) however OWC are known to be working on one.

 

[wytwolf]

What are you doing to wear out a SSD in 6-12 months? There is a lot of reads/writes and then there is what you do. I don't think you realize SSD are tougher then you realize.

Anandtech did an endurance test on the Samsung 840 (TLC has less write cycles in it's lifetime before failure) and they estimated a life span of 23 years with a 256GB SSD and writing 10GB a day. The Samsung 840Pro's and 850Pro's would last even longer (70years @ 10GB/day with the 256GB SSD).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand

To quote Anandtech:

"Of course, if you write 20GiB a day, the estimated lifespan will be halved, although we are still looking at several years. Even with 30GiB of writes a day the 256GiB TLC drive should be sufficient in terms of endurance. Write amplification can also go over 10x if your workload is heavily random write centric, but that is more common in the enterprise side - client workloads are usually much lighter. "


Worst case scenario was the 120GB SSD TLC memory last 11.7years @ 10GB/day (Samsung 840 or 840 evo). At 1 year you would have to write at 100GB/day and 6 months 200GB a day. NO one.... I mean no one would be doing that much writing on a MacBook pro. That would be a server farm.

Plus OSX requires downtime to activate TRIM. Without TRIM the SSD would drop down closer to HD write speeds. I guess if it's constantly running at max write speed (even without trim) I may wear out in a few months. You would need 2 SSD's constantly moving files between them as only another SSD would have the read speeds to max out the writes.


But to answer your question last time I checked OWC and Transcend sell MBP compatable SSD's. They look more like desktop RAM sticks more the a regular SSD.

 

[cjmillsnun]

But to answer your question last time I checked OWC and Transcend sell MBP compatable SSD's. They look more like desktop RAM sticks more the a regular SSD.

They are not compatible with Late '13 and Mid '14 rMBPs that use PCIe SSDs. They're for the Mid/Late '12 and 'Early 13 rMBPs that use SATA SSDs.

 

[blooperz]

pretty sure it would be covered by apple care if it wore out that early