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Are Consumer Hard Drives Headed Into History?
Lucas123 writes "With NAND flash fabricators ramping up production, per GB prices of solid state drives are expected to drop by more than half by this time next year to about 50 cents. Even so, consumers still look at three things when purchasing a computer: CPU power, memory size, and drive capacity, giving spinning disk the edge. SSD manufacturers like Samsung and SanDisk have tried but failed to change consumer attitudes toward choosing SSDs for their performance, durability and lower power use. But, with the release of the new MacBook Air (sans hard disk drive), Steve Jobs has joined the marketing push and may have the clout to shift the market away from hard drives, even if they're still an order of magnitude cheaper."
He has enough clout to push about 8% of consumers to buy overpriced hardware.
I've got an SSD in my laptop, and I couldn't be happier. Its easily lengthened the life of my laptop by about 2 years.
Even if the Per GB price dropped by 80 or 90% SSD's would still be more expensive and have a lot shorter life expectancy than current HDD's, we are many many years before the possibility of SSD's fully replacing HDD's becomes even conceivable
SSDs are known for their durability? Perhaps if properly set up, with temp and cache in memory instead of on disk, then yes.
Correct me if I'm wrong, bOtherwise, constant read/writes (at least used to) chew through the "spare blocks".
I have had the opposite experience. I bought a small SSD and was really happy with it until it died after 2 months of use. I didn't even have a swap partition :(
I tend to hold on to my tech for years. With the finite number of read/writes to flash memory, I don't want to be forced to part with a computer because it uses a proprietary flash storage system or be forced to purchase a proprietary replacement storage module.
Things like iPods, smart phones, and PDAs are cheaper and easily replaced in whole, but I wouldn't want to face a replacement cost for a laptop.
I would cringe to do secure erases (writing zeroes) to a flash memory drive (solid state drives or Apple's flash "drive" module in the new Airs), knowing I was prematurely killing my storage life. Platter-based disks with sudden motion sensors will still be my huckleberry for a few more years...
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
more than 10 million laptops ships with SSDs annually
Steve Jobs has joined the marketing push
...may have the clout to shift the market away from hard drives...
$0.50 per GB is still about five times the cost of a magnetic drive. Put another way, each user has the choice between paying $50 and $250 for the same amount of storage. Does anyone think there is a real competition here?
And of course, that's by next year. How much denser/cheaper will magnetic drives be by then? Please stop with these "year of the flash drive" posts.
In Windows 7 you have TRIM to make sure the SSD keeps its performance over time. What does Apple have to offer in this area for Mac OS X? I tried to put a OCZ Vertex in a MacBook Unibody, but after the drive got completely filled up, the performance gain was lost. In Windows 7 the drive is fast like it should thanks to TRIM. Is it any different from the Apple blessed drives you get in the Air or when you order SSD as a option straight from Apple?
Dvorak on Doomtech
What ever happened to transition technology? Most PCs and laptops have media card readers, PC card slots. Put the OS and Apps on a SSD card and save the spinning disk for personal storage.
"if Apple are involved it must be news"
Yeah, they're headed to history, but that might take another ten years.
So is Steve Jobs.
With the rest of us to follow.
Certain technologies have pretty long shelf lives - Hard Drives are one of those. Tape Backups and CDs are another.
Sure SSDs are getting cheaper, but so are hard drives. Hard drives are now a nickel a GB, half the price of just a year ago. The best SSD prices still look like they're 40x as expensive.
Sure, they'll take over the small drive / low power / slim profile market, especially for expensive hardware (SteveJobsthankyouverymuch). But as we do more with large audio/video/photo files, out appetite for storage is still a 5-10 years away for cost effective SSDs at TODAY's rate of use.
Just look at the usenet. DivX was king, with only hard core nuts going with full DVD rips. Then HD was here and everything was recompressed to 720p x264. Now it's mostly 1080p x264 recodes and straight 26GB AVC rips. Our use is definitely not slowing down, and spinning platters is the only thing that can give us that kind capacity for the foreseeable future.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Consumers vote with their wallet. Give them the same storage space at the same or even close, and the market will shift to SSDs. Given that these points are still far apart for SSDs means that no matter what manufacturers do (aside from discontinuing disk drives altogether), people won't buy SSDs in any great numbers. Apple fans seem not to mind paying for overpriced hardware, so the fact that Jobs is wading in doesn't really matter for the majority of the small computer market (PCs).
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Consumers go for numbers. This one has 1.5TB and this one has 200GB. Well the 1.5TB *MUST* be better, so I"m going to buy that so I can check my mail and surf teh intarwebz.
Additionally, SSD's aren't a panacea yet. Sure they're fast but they do have a finite life and as far as that goes they are best for short term storage rather than long term, and vice versa for hard drives except for the finite life part.
There's my 2 inflated-into-uselessness cents.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
...but I can definitely see hard disks still having a role as external backup or archival storage for years to come. The amount of data (photos, music, video) that people are accumulating will guarantee this!
-MT.
-MT.
Why would I switch to SSD? I've had 1 drive go bad in my lifetime. They've lasted in some cases 20+ years. Plus they are cheaper. Why would I bother buying SSD's when they have a known failure point at after given number of writes?
This is very much like the blue-ray issue. It's not surprising folks aren't interested in jumping on board because, frankly, there is no real reason to run out and BUY it.
CD's and DVD's had huge adoption because you saw a large improvement on your existing hardware. Bluerays required a new TV to see that improvement - and it was a very expensive TV at the time.
Once people have purchased new TV's (it will probably take another 5-10 years for the older TV's to all fail so that the mom and pops of the world HAVE to go buy a new one) blue-rays will have come way down in price and they'll finally replace the DVD.
Likewise the SSD. I'm sure many other folks are as tired as I am regarding these silly... strike that... STUPID press releases trying to push their sale.
They will be bought when there is a need. There is none at this point, except in very specific applications, like the high-vibration atmosphere at manufacturing plants.
Shame on Slashdot's editors for continuing to run this hokey marketing BS, and shame on the people who continue to send articles like this. It's quite silly, frankly.
Spec the street price of 3 TB of SSD to replace the new "old" drives hitting availability this week and get back to me.
Arrogant use-case much? What ever happened to the hybrid drives that were supposed to be the practical solution...
Ssds are quite attractive for internal drives, their speed advantage means quicker booting, faster application startup etc, but eventually you hut the point of diminishing returns, for instance even external hard drives allow you to watch movies without any noticeable delay so you gain very little by putting them on ssds. So while laptops and to a certain extent desktops will see fewer internal magnetic disks, that won't mean the end if consumer level magnetic disks at all.
Monstar L
Even with the best wear leveling techniques SSDs will not be able to provide the sort of write cycles that a magnetic drive can withstand. This may not be an issue in most consumer use, but the possibility is there that somebody will hear of a friend of a friend's uncle who had his entire life's work (read: porn collection) wiped out. Something doesn't actually have to be a risk for someone to freak out about it and avoid the technology.
On the other end of the spectrum of usage scenarios: If the disk is not accessed and rewritten occasionally the issue of disappearing data comes up. In a NAND cell the data may be stored by as few as 100 electrons which are trapped in the floating gate of the transistor. Over the years imperfections in the insulation layers or quantum tunneling through the insulation layers (some of which are merely a few atoms thick) results in the electrons escaping and the cell eventually becoming unreadable. The target minimum data retention time for NAND flash is 10 years, but just due to the absurd number of individual transistors in a SSD some data will be lost before that time period. Suboptimal storage temperatures combined with smaller cell sizes and multi-level-cell NAND flash designs tend to make this effect worse.
SSDs may find a home in specialized situations where the pros outweigh the cons, like laptops, but I doubt they will ever displace magnetic hard drives in most applications.
We often deploy SSD's in our POS terminals and recommend SSD for clients who have busy checkout lanes and performance matters. However, in servers we're still HDD because they are well known and proven technology. SSD's have been on the market long enough that they are starting to prove themselves.
But at home, I much rather have the 1TB HDD drive rather than 128MB SSD for the same price. Same thing in my laptop. I much rather have the extra storage space for the money than performance.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
SSDs are the LCDs of hard drives. In time they will be cheap reliable and fast. Moore's law will win in the end.
The ssd is already a good value for the function of the boot drive - the place where you host the OS, applications and games. There is no need to approach terabyte territory to hold all this stuff. And my collection of ripped DVDs, etc., wouldn't benefit from being on an ssd. These two technologies make sense in parallel and will continue to do so for so long as the per-terabyte prices keep falling at the present rate.
The MacBook Air is a pretty poor example to choose as a shift to SSDs. In the MacBook Air, the SSD chips are soldered to the logic board. It is not like there is a choice on what kind of drive can be installed. When 64GB isn't enough, there is no way to upgrade. When the SSD gets a fault, there is no drive to swap out - it would be time for a new logic board. With NAND Flash having a finite lifetime, soldering the SSDs to the logic board is a prime example of planned obsolescence. When the SSD dies (when, not if), there is only Apple to turn to, so Apple effectively has vendor lock-in as well, but we have come to expect that from Apple.
Marketing isn't going to shift far away from traditional hard drives any time soon. Yes, prices for NAND flash is dropping but there are disadvantages to using flash: low capacities (compared with HDDs), relatively low write performance and a finite lifetime of write cycles (yes wear levelling does help, but doesn't eliminate the core of the problem).
Hard drives may still be much cheaper in terms of $/GB, but that is only the important number for geeks who actually care about big drives.
The important number for the mass market is the minimum price for a new drive of minimally usable size (call it 32-64 GB for now, it's drifting up, but not terribly quickly by the standards of exponential tech progression). And I suspect that SSDs will surpass HDDs in that metric fairly soon. A hard drive has a certain amount of unavoidable manufacturing complexity and materials requirements, no matter what the capacity, whereas a SSD is basically just chips and can be made almost arbitrarily cheap as fabrication technology leads to fewer and smaller chips being required for the same capacity and performance.
In a five years or so, I expect the "drive" on most new computers to be just another $10 chip on the motherboard.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Think about it -- couldn''t most of the real people you know, the ones you do upgrades and friends/family tech support for, get along just fine with 256GB or so of mass storage?
Yeah, the price differential will be there, but it won't be that big. Another aspect, at Fry's this morning I noticed that disk drives smaller than 250GB are getting harder to find at least at pseudo-retail.
So, most real people/families could get along fine with SSD based systems, particularly if they have a box on their network with a much bigger rotating beast for storing backups and other files.
And us folks that frequent Slashdot will end up there too, as price comes down, because the combo of (hi) speed and (low) power is so good with SSDs -- especially when we already have bigger boxes off in the closet to store those massive collections of pr0n^h^h^h^h files...
Same story here. Didn't hesitate to buy a replacement when the first failed after 3 months. The speed difference is just incredible. Bit early to call spinning drives dead for me yet, DVRs for example.
50 cents per gb is cheap?
I'm no math genius, but wouldn't that make 1TB be about $500? The absolute hugest spinning-platter harddrive, the just-announced Western Digital Green 3TB drive costs less than HALF that ($239 at newegg) for three times the storage, and a 1tb can be had for $60.
Until SSD prices get much, MUCH closer to that range, and until someone can reassure me that they'll last for several years of heavy use, the only way I'll use one in my desktop is an OS-only-quick-boot drive.
Yeah, it might be worth the extra money on laptops, but some of us still have desktops, and RAID arrays, and we'd rather not spend $10K on something we can get for $1K and might not even give us a performance boost or last.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
It's simply absolute price for a reasonable amount of storage, which these days is around 250GB. Sure I can pop in multi-TB drives for less money, and I do on the machines that need that kind of storage. But the vast majority of machines out in the world don't really need terrabytes of storage. If you don't actually need the storage then it doesn't really matter whether the drive you have installed is 250G or 2TB.
The comments regarding a SSD's ability to extend the life of older computer hardware, and even brand spanking new computer hardware, are right on the mark. How meaningful is one or two hundred extra dollars if your laptop is nice and responsive with the latest memory-hogging software for another year or two because you popped in that SSD? Not very meaningful at all.
So if the question is when will SSDs really start to take off in the consumer world as more than just a niche item? It will be when the price point for that 250G SSD drive drops to something reasonable, like $100 or so. That price point is not actually that far off.
In terms of durability I gotta laugh at anyone who thinks a hard drive is more durable than a SSD. Hard drives last maybe 5 years. I don't think any of my HDs have lasted more than 7 or so years without accumulating serious enough errors to warrant replacement. There is one key difference... it is possible to recover critical data off a HD many years later whereas data stored in flash is gone once it goes bad (and even that might not be true any more with HD densities getting so high). But those sorts of recovery services (where the HD cannot even be powered up any more without destroying it) cost a lot of $$ and I don't think your average consumer would ever use something like that.
Even a little Intel 40G SSD has a 35TB vendor-specified durability. When configured properly along with the OS that durability rises in excess of 200TB, and that's for the cheaper MLC flash. I have around 10 of the 40G SSDs installed and their durability is riding the 200TB mark based on the wear values returned from SMART over the last 8 months or so. The higher capacity SSDs have higher durabilities. With nominal use (which is 99% of the use cases) we are still talking 10 years plus for a small SSD.
I'm not sure who these people are complaining about SSDs failing on them... maybe they should post the vendors they bought them from along with the actual model. I haven't had a single one of my Intels fail and I'm hitting some of them pretty damn hard. I have not seen any performance drop-off with my SSDs either and, besides, a thrashing HD can only do 2MB/sec or so, even a SSD with a moderate performance dropoff is still going to do an order of magnitude better than a HD with a fragmented filesystem. When it comes right down to it if a performance drop-off is a problem for you, just copy the raw storage off the SSD and then back onto it. Poof, problem solved for another year or three.
TRIM is not really needed. In fact, it can be a liability performance-wise since it isn't a NCQ-capable command. All you really need to do is partition a fresh drive a bit smaller than its rated capacity and you get 95% of the benefit of TRIM without having to deal with it. If you have 120G SSD then create a 110G partition. Congratulations, you now have 95% of what TRIM would get you. It's funny how the rabble keeps screaming the TRIM mantra but it isn't that spectacular a feature.
-Matt
In the MacBook Air, the SSD chips are soldered to the logic board. It is not like there is a choice on what kind of drive can be installed. When 64GB isn't enough, there is no way to upgrade. When the SSD gets a fault, there is no drive to swap out - it would be time for a new logic board. With NAND Flash having a finite lifetime, soldering the SSDs to the logic board is a prime example of planned obsolescence. When the SSD dies (when, not if), there is only Apple to turn to, so Apple effectively has vendor lock-in as well, but we have come to expect that from Apple.
No, the SSD's are on a removable board. See http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A1370-Teardown/3745/1 (It's the thing that comes off from above the RAM)
Honestly where is the bonus in using a SSD? First it's more expensive. Second for what you do pay for they are really small in today's world of bigger and bigger files, os installs, media, etc. Third they are not like HDDs where you can use it for almost forever in computer terms (longer than 10 years). SSD are known to fail after X point. No matter what you do this is a drawback of the technology. The only people that would actually notice any REAL observed performance are the early adopters/IT people that don't mind spending hundreds of dollars on a 40gb drive. Your average computer user cannot tell the difference between 5400 rpm, 7200rpm or even 10000rpm. They don't notice at all. SSD drives fill a niche market.
Apologies. You are correct. The board is a custom part, and I doubt that you will find replacements from anyone but Apple, so they still have vendor lock-in, and Apple can easily EOL parts, so there is still a degree of planned obsolescence.
SSDs are still not a good value for their MBTF (Mean Time Between Failures). I predict the hybrid harddrive/SSD combo drive will be the near term winner (assuming laptops don't all get as small as the Air). I have had several friends recently purchase and install hybrid drives in their laptops and they gave it a "thumbs up" for performance but are very paranoid about failure, so they backup much more frequently. Additionally, these drives spin down quite regularly which increase battery life, however there are concerns about the duty cycle of spinup/spindown before failure. Example Hybrid Drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591&cm_re=hybrid_hard_drive-_-22-148-591-_-Product
You can get 500gb for $40 with decent specs on it which is like 8cents per gig. Unless I'm using it in a production environment I don't really care so much about the speed difference between your typical SATA hard drive and all of these new solid state things. I think speed will really matter once the price has lowered enough to about 15cents per gig and we go through a year of hard drive space not really budging in default pc's/laptops. Even then, the average consumer probably won't ever use more than 2tb legally until of course 4k resolution monitors come out and the size of games and other media will be vastly bigger, as they normally do.
No the flash modules are not soldered to the logic board.
See this
The flash module uses a mini pci-e connector like the wireless module right above it. While it might require an Apple module at the moment, it is serviceable.
After 12 years and a few days, I finally gave in to the dark side and joined slashdot.
The more trivial the topic under discussion, the more likely someone will attempt to shame people who hold a contrary opinion.
The RAM is soldered in
Let me just repeat that, in case it hasn't quite sunk in yet.
The RAM is soldered in/ If you buy it with 2GB, you can't upgrade it. If you buy it with 4 GB, you can't upgrade it.
However, you can upgrade the SSD.
source
Of course, it comes with a paltry 1.4 GHz Core 2 Duo (soldered in, naturally) or a 1.6 GHz C2D.
Oh, I see that my new talking points have come in from Apple.
You don't need a faster processor because it's still faster than an Atom.
You don't need to upgrade the RAM, because virtual memory on an SSD is so much faster.
Thanks, Apple! My Fanboy subscription still pays dividends!
Kryder's Law is an analog to Moore's Law, and states that magnetic disk density doubles every year or so. As long as this law is roughly true, raw disk space per dollar will be cheaper in magnetic disks than flash. See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=kryders-law for more information. With the explosion in information out there, I believe disk space per dollar is a critical criteria for many industries and applications.
That said, consumer computing will be dominated by flash memory (it's already half way there). Consumer demand for disk space does not increase exponentially like capacity, so even flash capacity will be overkill at some point. Instead, consumers will value random access speed and dependability (especially in portable computing).
The day may come when individual possession of a hard drive may be illegal, as a "piracy device". How many people generate enough data of their own in their lifetime to fill a 1 TB drive?
Hmm spend 2$/GB on something that is going to be dead within 3 months of me installing it on my server or spend 6/GB for 3.5' drives or 12/GB for 2.5' drives which should last a few years... Yeah that is a really hard decision...
1 year. You may not be old enough, but just look at any tech magazine from the nineties and you'll read expert opinion on why Apple was going to fail within a year. This went on pretty much all through the nineties. It eventually became a joke. And now folks short on history are filling those doomsayer shoes.
Round and round it goes...
but I've had more hard drives than I can care to think about, with 1 genuine failure.
I recently bought an SSD for my laptop, from Corsair. Many people seem to have had a problem with the drive, from it disappearing from the BIOS through to massive data corruption (me, yay).
Yes, it's a sample of 1. But I won't be going near SSD for a hell of a long time - Corsair refuse to admit to a problem, despite them having phased out the model very quickly. SSD has potential, but not at current prices, with their current life-span and failure / fault rates.
I've adopted technology quickly before. As time has gone by, I've discovered that you don't get bit by underpowered and overpriced by living on the edge (and make no mistake, that was my home at one time). I'm still looking at read-write lifetimes, and dependability rates. Will they last 8+ years? It seems I've had more than my share of old dead and dying drives. The last dead drive I played with had read problems once it got above a certain temperature, and it got there after being turned on more than about 10 minutes. I found that keeping it in a fridge for about 30 minutes, plugging it into an external firewire bay with a 20 inch fan keeping /that/ cool, I was able to retrieve data from it (but only for the first 10 minutes). Rsync was my friend. When I have a bad chip on the solid state drive, is all lost?
All these companies want me to switch, fine, just fine, but give me a CHEAP intro drive to try it out first. No, I am not going to spend hundreds on a drive, try $29.95 for like a 20-30 gig drive, around there, for a teaser try it out drive. For 50 bucks on sale you can find huge spinning drives, half a tera or better in size. I use a 20 gigger now, that I dumpster dove for, and it is mostly empty because I don't store games or media like movies on it, it's just for the OS, meaning 20 gigs is enough, so where is a cheap and small is OK SSD drive that doesn't suck?
Not all of us are rolling in dough and run the latest and greatest high end stuff, but we still will spend SOME money, just make us an offer that doesn't suck, like one dollar equals one gig of space on your SSD, at the LOW end in size.
In the long term? Yes I'm sure flash, or some other solid state, based storage will replace magnetic disks. It is just plain faster, not to mention other benefits. Our storage subsystem is by far the slowest thing we've got, improvements would be welcome.
In the short term? Hell no. SSDs are useful in special cases, but not for general use and not showing any signs of reaching a crossover soon.
I mean if I wanted to meet my storage needs with SSDs only, I'd have to spend on the order of $10,000. Granted, my needs for storage exceed most users, but still. It costs me all of about $500 to get them met with HDDs. Even if I left backups to magnetic media and just went with SSDs for primary storage I'd still be out about $4000. I could replace every component in my system, including my professional NEC monitor, for less than that.
Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to have SSDs, but they have to come down in price a shitload before they are realistic for the regular desktop. Right now, SSDs have 3 uses:
1) Systems that don't need a lot of storage and space/power are a premium. The Air is a good example. If you can live with 64GB of storage, then flash is ok price wise. Still expensive per GB, but since you have few GBs it isn't bad. If all you are doing is running basic apps then that works fine. You can't hold much media or large games or whatnot, but not all systems need that.
2) Systems where performance beyond what reasonable HDD solutions can offer is needed. Audio production sees this. New virtual instruments are getting extremely complex. Tons and tons of samples played back in heavy layers. You can't load them all in RAM (without amazing amounts of RAM) and they just overload disks when you try to stream it all. SSDs can be useful here. While a $10,000-20,000 fiber channel array would probably do the trick, a $4000 SSD will also do the trick and not only cost less but be easier to deal with.
3) Ultra high end storage solutions that need performance beyond anything HDDs can offer. With databases, you can run in to this. Heck they had SSDs back before they were popular. Expensive, expensive devils, but tons of performance. You need this to reach certain performance levels, no amount of disks can handle the IOPs you need. This is where cost just isn't an issue, performance is.
That's pretty much it. For cheap systems, HDDs reign supreme. They cost less than flash and that is that. For higher end systems, you end up needing more storage than flash can provide at a reasonable cost.
Before we see flash replace HDDs we will probably see augmentation. Intel, Adaptec, LSI, all are supporting SSDs as a cache for HDDs on various RAID controllers. If this comes down to consumer price levels, could be useful. 1TB of storage for $100 and then $100 more for some flash cache would be doable for many people.
It'll be a long time before SSDs are the way most people go, however. It is too bad, I want solid state storage now, but there is a big, BIG price gap that has to be covered.
... as well as software. Most operating systems and programs still operate under the assumption of hard disk IO kinds of access times and things of such nature.
The biggest problem is the interfaces aren't wide enough to give speeds that would justify buying SSD's at current prices. There needs to be a huge speed increase and interfaces and current SSD transfer rates at the present time limit that in a large way.
We need new interfaces for SSD's and have to wait a few generations of SSD's before speed justifies moving away from hard disks at all for the price premium.
Data redundancy at low cost and ease of backup matters more then speed.
I acquired an unplanned 40 gig SSD more-or-less accidentally in a trade, not a recent or high-end model. I put it in my Linux desktop s boot/system drive with a RAID 1 of rotating disks as /home & swap. It really improved performance a lot.
I'm sold. As soon as budget allows, I'll get an even faster SSD with PCI-e interface, put that in the main machine & move the SATA one to another machine.
You know who else tried to shame people who held a contrary opinion?
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
so you really think everyone is going to store their huge music & video collections on expensive SSD's? Not to mention backups. Hard drives are going to be with us for a long time. You can't beat the $$ per MB.
Soldering issues aside, a user replaceable SSD does stand a good chance to replace hard disks in netbooks. Apple's "planned obsolescence" is one for their marketing team.
The point of the article was that the cost per GB became too great as manufacturers relented and stuck Windows on them. But with prices falling, 64GB may well be a sweet spot. We're talking internal storage here and for moderate use that's plenty for many regular folks.
'The cloud', network shares and external terabyte USB disks can serve as external storage and for the target netbook user, a silent, light machine with no spinning parts is the point.
Back when CD-Rs were new, we were hearing how they'd last for well over 50 years. Now we're finding that CD-Rs last only 3 to 5 years, and that's when they're stored in conditions that are near-perfect.
It's pointless to take media lifespans measured in decades as anything other than marketing bullshit, especially given that the computer industry itself has only been around for about 65 years.
High priced for nifty tech. Nothing wrong with that, but that doesn't mean most people are going to get it. The Air is a $1000 netbook. A nice one to be sure, but that's what it is. Fine, at $1000 for a 11" computer you can afford some solid state storage, though even then it isn't much. However doesn't mean you can afford that same storage in a $400 11" computer, as many other companies sell. Nor does it mean you could afford 640GB of solid state storage, the kind of thing you might want in a desktop or more powerful laptop.
That Apple does something in computers has nothing to do with what will be big in the market. It is the consumer electronics arena where they set the pace, not computers. They make many choices that never catch on. A good example is desktops. Apple believes that everyone should want either an all-in-one like the iMac, or a workstation like the Mac Pro. They do not believe in a normal desktop, that is a tower with only one processor socket, consumer RAM and so on. None the less, that continues to be the most popular thing companies like Dell sell in their desktop space. People do buy all-in-ones, most companies sell them, but far fewer than other desktops. It just hasn't replaced towers, despite Apple pushing it for years.
Also the cases that people like to say "Apple pushed the market to (or away from) X," aren't real. It is just Apple forcing a change on their hardware early and then later pointing back to it and saying "See? Look at us!" USB would be a good example. Apple got rid of ADB and went all USB very early. They weren't the first computer to have USB though (Intel made USB and PC boards were shipping with it right after its introduction), nor did their switch kill off PS/2 or any of the other connections. Even in the Mac world, there was brisk sales in ADB to USB adapters for keyboards, dongles, etc. The PC industry ignored Apples change and slowly transitioned to USB because it was a good bus, not because Apple pushed it. However the transition still isn't "complete" and only recently, in the last couple years, have significant numbers of PCs stopped shipping with PS/2. Apple may have been early, but they didn't push anything.
Same shit with SSDs. You could actually get a high end laptop form Sony with an SSD for quite some time. Apple isn't changing anything, they've just decided to make their high end netbook have SSD storage only. Ok, fine, notice there are no similar announcements from other companies. Notice people are not scrambling to go SSD. Nor will they be. SSD adoption will slowly increase as the price per GB comes down. I've no doubt eventually, hopefully in 10 years or less, we go all SSD pretty much. However it won't be because Apple drove anything, it'll be because SSDs are faster and they'll have reached the price to compete with magnetic storage.
Consider that, five whole years after the introduction of the first flash iPod, Apple still sells the spinning ones. In fact they're your only choice if you want more than 64GB in your iPod. So, sure, let's revisit the subject of laptop HDD's being obsoleted in another five years. But who even knows if it will be traditional flash SSD's or if memristors or some other tech (MRAM, NRAM, etc.) will win.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
What is this, another article submission by a shill for the SSD manufacturers? Here we go again:
1. submit dodgy article to Slashdot
2. sow seeds of doubt
3. profit!
Reduction in price is all it will take for SSDs to take off in the consumer space. People want faster disks, and anyone who has experienced an SSD loves it. However most people also need a good amount of space. Games and media are hungry these days. No problem. HDDs are big, but it is a problem at SSD prices. So, HDDs continue to sell in 99+% of systems.
When SSDs drop to about 20ish% of their current price, you'll see a whole lot more sales in high end systems. They'll still be more expensive than HDDs by several times at that point, but affordable enough that people who demand high end storage can justify them. If you could get 1TB of SSD for $500 that would be feasible for a high end system. You could still spend a good bit on storage, a lot more than an HDD, but it is doable and many would. At 10% or so you now compete favorably with high end 10k desktop drives. So pretty much anyone currently willing to buy high end desktop storage would probably go with SSD. At about 5% you've hit HD prices, and HDDs will rapidly die out.
Well that's doable, a 20x reduction in price is perfectly feasible and we've seen it in electronics before. However let's not kid ourselves, it'll be a good bit before we see that. Until then, we aren't going to see HDDs die out.
It's an ultra-portable. What do you expect? 16 wide open RAM slots with a door in the bottom for easy access?
The "paltry" 1.4Ghz CD2 *is* better than most of the other offerings at this size and weight, and is the very low voltage variant from Intel designed with battery life and heat management in mind.
Your complaints seem to stem from "it's not as upgradable as a full size laptop, or as powerful! It needs to have all the benefits of a laptop, but also be really tiny and have all the benefits of an ultra-portbale at the same time".
It's not a TARDIS. Compromises were made when it was designed, to make it small. The other SSD offerings from Apple (and RAM) are in more standard configurations (SATA connectors, standard slots, etc) because they have the room to do that.
SSDs may replace primary drives, but they're complete pants for bulk storage.
And guess what's taking off these days? Oh, granted, it'll never be at the level of, "I haz a computer! I go on the Internets!", but I can't swing Steve Jobs' ego around without hitting two dozen people who have a NAS set up for serving media.
Not until the price per gb goes down to rotational drive levels.
I recently stepped into my local best buy and bought a 1.5 TB drive for $70. The price was so good I bought several more and I now have a pretty nice software raid 5 going.
Yes. But I was concerned to see the restore media come in a flash drive. Maybe it's not really flash since it's read-only?
When has Job given a shit about making things cheaper ?
You can buy a new 17" laptop today with 4 gigs of ram and 640 gig hd for under $500. For the price of a 640gig SSD, you can buy a half-dozen laptops and have your own portable compute cluster.
However many SSDs have garbage collection. In particular, drives with the SandForce controller do garbage collection and work fine in Macs (not to mention they're pretty good for price to performance based on benchmarks from AnandTech).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
since according to tfa nobody really needs onboard storage anymore, they'll be perfectly fine paying 20 times more for the storage they won't use.
otoh, since i didn't get that particular memo, i just bought a 2tb outboard drive for $99.99. that's 5 cents a gb, or 1/20 the cost of an ssd. and believe me, i need all that and more the way my media's piling up, when every time i "tivo" a netflix dvd to my drive i lose another four gigs.
hey, a quarter here, a quarter there and pretty soon i have enough money to send bainwol and glickman greeting cards.
- js.
I specifically excluded the Apple category so I wouldn't have to see Steve Jobs in every other story. And yet, he's still on the homepage a couple of times a day. Awesome.
And if it's for all of your word files, and presentations, then backing them up is going to take forever, as even 80 gigs of smalish word documents would take hours to back up on an hdd.
So yes the SSD's are a bad choice for movies, and big files. but the people who want SSD's aren't all that interested in loading a movie 50ms faster, they want to be able to:
_ Do a virus scan in a reasonable time.
_ Copy lots of files in a short amount of time, without having some guy spending time zipping them all up for the transfer.
_ Look through all their files for the mention of "nuclear chicken repellent"
You cant do this with an HDD, unless your version of lots and reasonable become much more forgiving than mine.
Storm
Why is this a concern? I'd rather a USB stick than a CD/DVD any day. And it probably is read-only, it would make sense - however it would still be flash-based.
What are the current read/write speeds for flash based SSDs these days? Both peak and sustained? I have not looked in ages and really would like to know. Can they even compare with HDDs nowadays? Do flash based SSD's use an internal RAID0 (or similar) method to spread reads/writes across multiple chips and thus increase overall write speeds?
I figure the wear algorithms and # of cycles these days is such that they'd last long enough for me, but price and read/write speeds are an issue to me.
Let's invent a buzzword for SSDs like "PowerStream Boost w/ Turbo AI", makes no fucking sense but people will gobble it up even if they have no clue what it really means. Ultimately SSDs just need to be marketed correctly to educate customers that there is a performance improvement and that you do not need the larger hard drive. A lot of consumers could probably even get by with a 64 or 128GB SSD. So just market it as "20,000 Operations Per Second!!!! Thanks to PowerStream Turbo. Stores up to 20,000+ music files." People might ask "hmm how many Operations can that hard disk do" and if they find out it's only a few hundred, that might swing their purchasing decision.
Who the heck cares when for most people it's just empty space? I've got a terabyte harddisk that's not even 15% full. I only got it because it was the smallest 7200 rpm harddrive in it's class. The only folks I know who use that space are pulling high res video. Not a lot of people do that. If you don't need the space, why not get the speed?
What I wonder about is durability. Last I heard SSDs didn't last long in consumer grade devices because Windows thrashes the page file so much it kills the drive (limited # of writes per cell).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Not "my personal feelings resemble those of a 14 year old girl", but "I feel like (having sex with) a 14 year old girl" is what I guess he meant, in a similar linguistic format to, say, "I feel like (drinking) a beer"
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to have SSDs, but they have to come down in price a shitload before they are realistic for the regular desktop. Right now, SSDs have 3 uses:" - by Sycraft-fu (314770) on Saturday October 23, @08:08PM (#34000324)
$120 U.S. Dollars or so, & you can... & for a better one than you are thinking that use FLASH (this does not):
That's for a GIGABYTE IRAM 4gb DDR2 real SSD (I say, "real", because it's much faster on WRITES due to using DDR2, & it can be spanned/striped into a single 16gb unit as well, & for how I use it for greater performance? Writes, matter, & hugely... read on)
I use it for my KUbuntu 10.10.x swap partition (1/2gb of it) & other 1/2 gb for my Opera webbrowser cache and operating system temp/tmp operations, plus logging.
The other 3gb of that IRAM, I use for Windows':
1.) Pagefile.sys (read/write)
2.) %temp% & %tmp% ops (write/read)
3.) Webbrowser caches (read/write)
4.) OS & Apps logging (mostly writes)
5.) Print Spooling location also
6.) Command processor/%comspec% location for cmd.exe
7.) Lastly, for my HOSTS file location (faster read/write I-O)
All that on both OS', both 64-bit, & for simply mostly taking away from burdening my main C: drive in Windows, which is a Velociraptor) + my Linux OS setup dev/sdc1, which houses my OS & apps there on Linux.
So, that way, by speeding up the slowest part of any system, the HDD's, by unburdening it & lessening fragmentations this way on them?
This Intel QuadCore i7 920 + GeForce 470 OC based system flies, & even moreso, since the slowest part (HDD's, 10k rpm velociraptor or not) are also less burdened in doing so, & fragmenting less as well (dual bonus) due to those ops being removed from it, and to a place they occur much faster as well...
---
"1) Systems that don't need a lot of storage and space/power are a premium. The Air is a good example. If you can live with 64GB of storage, then flash is ok price wise. Still expensive per GB, but since you have few GBs it isn't bad. If all you are doing is running basic apps then that works fine. You can't hold much media or large games or whatnot, but not all systems need that." - by Sycraft-fu (314770) on Saturday October 23, @08:08PM (#34000324)
You can do things as I noted above as just a single example instead, if you're looking to increase overall system performance & responsiveness also... for much less too, only about $120 or so no less.
---
"2) Systems where performance beyond what reasonable HDD solutions can offer is needed. Audio production sees this. New virtual instruments are getting extremely complex. Tons and tons of samples played back in heavy layers. You can't load them all in RAM (without amazing amounts of RAM) and they just overload disks when you try to stream it all. SSDs can be useful here. While a $10,000-20,000 fiber channel array would probably do the trick, a $4000 SSD will also do the trick and not only cost less but be easier to deal with." - by Sycraft-fu (314770) on Saturday October 23, @08:08PM (#34000324)
I find it benefits me by unburdening my main C drive that houses my OS &/or programs, & makes virtual memory operations + ongoing constant temp ops also working on a true SSD tends to result in a nearly instanteneously repsonding system overall, in both Windows AND Linux really... just by doing the 'tricks' I do above. Surprisingly so, by not only moving things off to another disk (something I was hugely into in the early 1990's instead & moving to SSD's around 1995), but to a memory based disk (real RAM, faster on writes by far than FLASH is).
---
"3) Ultra high end storage solutions that need performance beyond anything HDDs can offer. With databases, you can run in to this. Heck they had SSDs back before they were popular. Expensive, expens
It bites that my MacBook air doesn't have a cable lock hole.
Gotta go take a leak? Bring your computer.
The new one doesn't seem to have one either.
When one of two things happen:
1. The SSD technology reduces in cost faster than the conventional drives do. At some point, it will become economically advantageous to switch, and it will happen en-masse. However, an order of magnitude in cost difference will keep most people from switching except for specific applications.
2. We reach a storage plateau. The point at which one has more HD space than they can possibly use or conceive of using. At that point, advances in the conventional HD storage will wane since increasing the size will no longer provide any significant advantage, and the base cost of construction isn't going to change. HOWEVER... I don't see this as particularly likely. If I could buy a 50 TB drive today, I'm sure I could find a way to fill it up in a short amount of time.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I got close to a TB on my drive, and just like all my lower capacity drives that came before it, I never come close to filling it. My videos are all on bluray discs, my music collection ripped from CD to my MP3 player, etc... All my programming and 3d graphics data doesn't take up too much space. Anything that would take up so much space on my hard drive would probably be better suited to a removable drive anyways. In my case an SSD would probably work out better.
It was called an eeePC about 4 years ago... I've got one running OS X Snow Leopard. a 250$ Acer One is about the same machine today.
I remember Stevie God dissing netbooks not so long ago. So, that new Jesus machine looks, weighs and feels like a Netbook. And WHY THE FSCKING GLOSSY SCREENS???
I'll keep my 900HA thank you...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
My 10kRPM 300G drive works perfectly for me. Call me when I can buy a SSD of that capacity for less then 250$. Aple is the company that market the Mini, essentially a micro laptop without speakers, screen, keyboard, mouse and expansion for more than I paid my laptop. Do not get me started about the price of tablets... Steve, you are rich, most os us are not, live with it!
Tomorrow is another day...
Well, I was going to whisper into the cacophony, "can we please assert that SSDs are also HDDs?" Then, just before writing this out, I expanded the acronyms and realised that "solid state drives" are not "hard disc drives". No doubt this will not be realised by most consumers -- I talk about bad computer memory and they get confused, or ask me if the files were backed up; another common confusion is hard drive == case + motherboard.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Are consumer hard drives headed into history? No.
Next question...
Not only does NAND flash have a limited number of erase/write cycles; it has a limited data retention lifetime - i.e., even if all you do is write it once on day 0 and then do nothing but read it, your data will start to disappear in due course. There is also a problem where repeated reading of particular pages causes other pages in the same block to be degraded and eventually lose their data. A good and rather exhaustive summary of NAND flash issues, including some not widely realized, is here.
However, low write performance is not a disadvantage of flash. Any decent flash SSD will blow every hard drive out of the water on write performance in the real world. Yes, there have been SSDs with incredibly bad controllers which quickly degraded to piss poor write performance in use, but no one should be using that crap at this point.
sounds like the mac book air is something i wouldn't touch. then again they killed it for me on the very first model where you couldn't change a dead battery. auases tried this with there seashell eee models and there sales sunk. the new editions of the seashell can change the battery.theirs just certen things you don't block the user from replacing ram drives battery. heck if anything laptop makers are making there systems even more user modifiable ausus gaming systems can even swap out the video card.
everyone feels eager to pay thousands of times too much for fast access to non-volatile memory?
Sounds as if Wall Street must be breathing done his neck to meet next quarters numbers for hype.
Large SSD drives have only been on the market for a few years? Is your PC be otherwise obsolete in a few years? Better rush out and buy six, just in case the other five fail.
As a content producer vice a content consumer, SSD's are about 'tits ona bull' useless. I need fast, fast write. I only care about fast, fast read when I'm playing back, and the real-world playback advantage of SSD drives in a production environment is not so great as to counteract the write disadvantage.
For the record, SSD's will have to reduce themselfes in price to about $.10/GB before I'm willing to swallow the performance his caused by slow NAND writes, and I think I'm not the only one tht thinks this way.
Apple, however, is playing smart by combining the advantages of the two drive types in a single form factor. The "OS/application SSD drive" + mass storage HDD is a very smart combination, it's just too damned expensive. The rent is too damned high!!!
== That terrible green-green grass, and violent blooms of flower dresses, and afternoons that make me sleepy.==
SSDs are probably just fine for a root filesystem, but prices must go way down before it's anything near an alternative for music/movie collections. I suspend those harddrives after 10 seconds without use and don't mind or care about the hard drive speed, if it's fast enough to play HD movies then that's just fine and the only thing that really matters to me when buying harddrives is price per gigabyte. Harddrives will keep on selling until SSDs are cheaper pr. gigabyte and that is not about to happen any time soon.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I think many people don't see the future, because there is only one drive right that is showing what I'm pretty certain is the future of Laptop/Desktop drives. Dedicated SSDs will continue to sell to enthusiasts and companies building fast tiered SAN's, but fully Hybrid drives like th Seagate Momentus XT will be what OEMS put into the laptops and desktops for the next several years. The Momentus XT only has 4 GB of SLC (very long life) Flash, but inmagine when you put 30 GB of speedy flash in like a 2 TB hard drive. Your OS and apps will all run like their on a SSD and your data files like pictures and movies will sit in the slower magnetic drive portion. And this will all be done without needing complicated tweaks or OS support. At first it will come on the higher end models were people will pay more for the nice speed boost. You will see, I'm right. Now if only I could predict what marketing buzz words will be invented to sell this. Maybe "Hyperboost Drives" ;P
SCSI was more popular for a reason. USB 1.1 was so slow that it took a few minutes to scan a sheet whereas a SCSI scanner could do it in seconds.
IIRC when USB first got started on PC's it was used for webcams and game controllers more than anything. The old LPT cams were a pain, & the old game ports often had issues as well.
Steve Jobs did this, Steve Jobs did that.
FUCK STEVE JOBS! FUCK HIM AND HIS LITTLE CULT OF PERSONALITY!
Seriously, Mac, while VERY popular, is an insignificant fraction of the PC market. As such, they're utterly irrelevant when it comes to talking seriously about truly widespread SSD adoption.
Yes, in another few years, barring the hitting of some natural ceiling for the technology, they'll eventually overtake spinning platter-based drives.
Right now they're not there yet. Price drops and size boosts or not. And until we see parity in drive capacities and pricing, to go SSD rather than conventional drives, you're not going to see any sort of massive movement. Thus far, we're still several years out from such an incentive.
Regardless of whether some toy computer salesman tells you they're ready or not.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
As much as manufacturers are trying to make everyone believe that the NAND flash write count limit is not an issue because of magical wear leveling technologies it really isn't something that can just be ignored. After having owned two NAND-flash storage devices that reached it I'm pretty sure I'm not going to replace HDDs with SSDs as long as they're based on NAND flash. At most I'd move the OS and apps off to one for the speed boost but keep swap and data on an HDD.
I have been writing programs lately on my computer. I has an old CPU, and what would be considered a small HD. OK the CPU is 386/20 and the HD is 20MB. This might sound small but it is not so bad when your language tools fit on one floppy. IMHO it is MS and Windows that have driven our space sensibilities mad. OK multimedia needs space, but that was what optical media was for. The point I was trying to make is that we were able to do a lot of great stuff with one thousandth of the space. 640K of ram was a lot when you were writing in assembler, and 40MB of HD was quite a bit for casual use. These days, it's, "I want one thousand billion bytes of storage on my computer, or I feel deprived" Just how much storage do you need in your hand? Can't you shift some of it to your house server, or your provider's server, or some higher level server. Just because you can doesn't mean it's a good idea to carry the library of congress in your phone. Massive portable data storage has led to massive data compromises. Oh well my humble opinion.
I would say that the speed improvement from an SSD is about an order of magnitude. Given that the perceived responsiveness of your machine frequently depends on loading applications you will probably get the biggest bang for the buck if speed is your thing.
Over the last decade I would say that highly parallel GPUs, cheap RAM with high throughput, and SSDs have brought the greatest speed improvement. In the future I would think that parallelized software for multicore CPUs, lower latency RAM, and maybe the fusion of CPU and GPU can bring speed improvements.
All my machines have SSDs in them, that speed boost was too good to pass up, price be damned. Only poverty seems a good reason not to buy an SSD.
Je me souviens.
First, I'm 100% magnetic storage free for my PCs. My laptop has an Intel x25-m G2 160GB SSD, and I have a Corsair Nova 120GB SSD in my desktop.
But hard drives are not dead yet. It makes no sense to use an SSD in my DVR, in a backup device, or as a media storage drive. These are applications that do not require the kind of random-access performance you get with an SSD, but they do require decent sequential throughput (which hard drives deliver) and low cost per byte.
I think that laptop hard drives will die first. Low power usage and shock resistance are critical here, and notebook HDDs have even less performance and cost more per GB than desktop hard drives. Desktop hard drives will follow later. After that, hard drives will live on for years as backup and media storage devices.
More portable than my netbook? I think not.
I can happily upgrade his RAM. Two slots actually.
Seriously, why? Sure I look at the size of the drive when I buy a laptop. I look at it and go "Why the hell can't I get something smaller?" Smaller and faster means a big speed increase and the ability to NOT lose a lot of when the laptop inevitably gets bumped/dropped/water spills/etc. NO valuable data should reside primarily on a laptop hard drive. So when the smallest drive I could order for my wife's Lenovo was 250GB, I went with that... Let me tell you, her previous laptop had a 20GB drive, and it was only a hair over half full. My x40 is dual boot, with a 40GB drive. Sure, I've got some games on there, and sure, modern games are bigger, but you can't tell me I need anything more than 64GB tops.
Now maybe I'm odd for having a NAS at home that's RAID backed and easily accessible, but in this day and age, it doesn't seem that odd to me, nor was it expensive it doesn't get dropped, it doesn't mind if it loses a drive, it doesn't get hot, or make noise and create heat or suck battery down when I'm working on the laptop and if I work on files there, they stay centrally located. Now maybe I don't have tons of copies of DVD's on my laptop, and perhaps other people do, but DVD only tops out at 9GB a pop, and how many people rip Bluray's to play with them on trips?
I think it's really just a ploy by the HDD manufacturers to try to make us want more space for no good reason.I have a total of 750GB on my NAS, it's been 250+GB Free for the last two years and I've not made a concerted effort to delete things like videos and pictures when I'm done with them. Unless people are doing lots of HD video editing with uncompressed files on their laptops, I don't see how anyone can use 500GB+ drives in there during the current decade. I'm sure we'll want more eventually when screen res gets to a point where vidoes need to store greater than HD, but it seems kinda like a stupid to benchmark for a laptop.
-=JML=-
...according to McGregor - TFA
Why does that sound so familiar?
Thanks that was informative. I'm going to wait until their next update in about a year to a year and a half. I think that my Macbook Air needs to have 4GB of ram, 256GB storage and a newer processor like perhaps a low voltage Core i3. The core i3 isn't necessary but I need to be able to be able to possible run 3 OSes at the same time so the 4GB is necessary.
>>> In the long term? Yes I'm sure flash, or some other solid state, based storage will replace magnetic disks.>>>
Give it 6 years and the new resistor memory will have killed off disks, be they spinning or flashing.
Memory will be memory, no RAM, no disks. The SSD manufacturers better hurry up, their time frame is tight.
SSDs are not meant to fully replace your hard drives. Spinning disks are just fine for the time being as they offer excellent capacity. What current SSDs do is they split storage from applications. You load all of your programs on your SSD, then load all of your backups, videos, MP3s, and movies to your hard drive. That way you get the best of both worlds - good performance from the SSD and good storage from the hard drive.
The SSD having a limited number of writes is pure FUD. Even if they are rated at 10,000 writes, figuring a write amplification of 2 (halving the writes), and that these shmoopy marketers are overcompensating writes (halving yet again), that leads to 2500 writes. This means you can write over the entire drive 2500 drives. With recent Sandforce drives having good wear leveling, you're looking at writing 320 TB of data to your SSD. Since when has an application ever written so much to an SSD? Even if you figure 500 writes, that's still 52 TB worth of data which is more than plenty for an application drive. You'd have to write 7-9GB of data per day for the drive to last 5 years (figuring 500 writes)
When you first get an SSD, the thing you notice is not the sequential reads or writes even though marketers like to push these numbers. You get it for the access times of 0.1ms and the ability to have random reads/writes between 20-70 MB/s. This is what makes SSDs appear fast to most people.
Right now, the barrier to entry for people is not even the cost per gigabyte but the technical know how to set up an SSD which requires a different thought process than an HDD. For an SSD, you need to get all storage moved to an HDD, and you need to perform some optimizations and use command line utilities to make sure things are working properly. Then you need to make sure TRIM is working, your BIOS is set to AHCI, and that you turn off hibernation, indexing, and a host of other optimizations that your OS natively does to work with spinning platters. This is the barrier to entry at a much greater height than the cost.
I'm seeing a few comments on SSD reliability here, but does anyone have any hard numbers to compare to HDD? I've replaced a couple of HDDs which have died this last year (most oldish, and part of a RAID so no big problems fortunately) but also a couple of near new external HDDs die on us as well.
I guess the other thing to look at, is if something DOES go wrong, how easy is it to recover data from a "dead" SDD? Data recovery is normally possible with HDD, though a bit on the expensive side, what's the chance of a bad PSU killing a SDD to the point that nothing can be recovered from it?
TBH, Reliability is more important to me than size by a long shot. though I only use my laptop as a portable device, storing everything on my desktop, and hey, if I run out of space there, there's lots more room for another drive.
I need my 2TB data drive more than 10x the disk I/O speed. HD prices as coming down almost as fast as SSD prices, so I don't expect SSDs to close the price gap anytime soon, nor their capacity to keep up with my ever-increasing data storage needs.
SSD on the consumer desktop may have a place, at the high end, as the OS drive. Or when, if ever, OSes start intelligently using SSDs as HD caches, instead of requiring a very wasteful full OS/Apps install on the SSD, or a very complicated manual partial install. I know, ZFS can do it, too bad Windows nor Mac nor most Linux installs don't use that. I don't understand why MS haven't adapted their ReadyBoost to SSDs yet.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
When I can get a decent 300gb, 500gb, or 1TB SSD for less than $100, with better performance and longevity characteristics than my less-than-$100 mechanical drive, then there are good reasons to consider using only SSD.
Until then, low-capacity SSDs running only as cache for the applications that really need them for IOPs are the way to go.
Most desktop PC users are not heavily disk I/O bound, the increase in performance/reduction in power usage is not necessarily worth the massively increased price of an SSD to replace mechanical storage GB for GB with SSD.
Capacity is what users run out of on the desktop.
Of course there are exceptions to the rule; people who do high-end video editing may run into disk throughput I/O bottlenecks, in regards to HD video capture rates, but actually, in that case SSDs don't really help. Still... some desktop app might benefit from high random IOPs capabilities of SSDs; maybe some day i'll hear of or come across one.....
"US consumer retail market" means people walking into a store and buying a piece of hardware, and it's expressed in terms of money, not units, and people spend a lot more for their Macs than for their PCs. It probably also includes iPhone, iPad, and iPod, and accessories sales, since it refers to Apple share, not Mac share. In terms of units, their share is still around 4-5% at most.
Aside from the fact that Macs are up to 20% in the U.S.
That's a lie. One study claims that Apple has 20% of the retail market. That's not Macs and it's not units, it's all of Apple and it's money paid. Since people pay a lot more for their Macs than PCs, and since they buy lots of expensive accessories, that still translates into only a small market share in terms of units. Apple probably still only has 4-5% of the desktop, laptop, and netbook markets.
I concur that info storage with no moving parts (discounting of course the actual workhorse - electrons) is the way to go.
However, CPU/Ram/Video is what I've been using to spec new machines for folks going on at least five years now.
The average Joe will never come close to exhausting their drive space, though as Video/Music more & more moves to the desktop (Society is not yet ready for the cloud, we still like having our stuff close at hand) the definition of average Joe is of course changing.
Yes, everyone has different needs, but by and large, when getting a new machine, pay more attention to Video performance than you do storage capacity. You'll be sorry if you didn't.
I thought Apple banned flash..
Am toying with the idea of using a SSD as primary OS drive. Would like to know, what FS layouts others are using to achieve a hybrid setup. Mainly:
1. Where do you put your /home partition (even as temp storage for d/l'ed stuff it tends to need a good 50GB of space)?
2. Where do you put your swap partition (granted, even with 2GB RAM I never actually use it, but like to have it around anyway just in case)?
Am not so much interested by the performance boost (though it'll be nice), but like to have a quiet & power-efficient setup since the machine's on 24/7. Right now I use a 7200RPM SATA 2.5" laptop drive as main drive (incl. /home and swap). Performance is OK, but nothing you get laid for by visiting females :-) Power consumption is good, however, with it being less than half of a regular 3.5" drive (this drive spins constantly). It's also completely quiet inside the case. Movies, Music etc. are on a separate 3.5" drive which only gets mounted on-demand and span/shut down afterwards.
So...how'd you best fare with an SSD in the picture to have:
1. desktop speed ... can SSD's handle this?)
2. low power consumption (ramped up only when needed)
3. as little noise as possible
4. still space for things that need it
5. fully encrypted FS (LUKS/LVM
I run multiple sites and the number of safari users my agent based filtering has banned is increasing quite a bit. I'm hoping to install some firewall and blacklist based software to ban college domains with the majority of mac users and hopefully that'll help out some.
It is an ultra portable.
Frankly most laptops and netbooks don't let you upgrade the CPU.
The ram it would be nice if that was upgradeable but I do not see how they could do that on that design.
But then if you want those features in an Apple just get a Macbook or a Macbook pro.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The MacBook Air is many a slashdotter's wet dream: they get to rip on it both by cherry picking the ways their cheaper netbook is better, and by cherry picking the ways their heavier laptops are better. Everything about the MacBook Air is wrong for being both too much and too little.
iFixit cracked the case on a new Macbook Air and did an expose. http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-11-Inch-Model-A1370-Teardown/3745/1 The SSD is a DIMM package, not chips soldered onto the main logic board. It seems to be a custom design from Toshiba, not anything off the shelf from the regular suppliers of SSDs (Corsair, Intel etc.) but it can be swapped out and replaced, and maybe in the future when the flash chips are up to it Apple or some OEM will release a larger capacity version. The main system RAM IS soldered onto the board and is not field-upgradeable.
Indeed, and it's not just Apple that's doing it. My Eee PC has the version of SSD that looks a lot like a stick of RAM. For that exact purpose, a Netbook manufacturer does not have a lot of room to put things, and by using an SSD stick, they can actually fit it in the case. They'd have a hard time putting a Hard disk in, except perhaps a microdrive in a case that size.
The slant of this article is purposely antagonistic. "Yes the entire computer movement boils down to two people's influence: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs" - One person will control all of the toys? I'm telling Mom!
I just started taking Electronics courses this year in college. Within the first week came the news of the Memristor and all the promise that holds for our collective data storage future. I was a bit upset because the component wasn't going to be part of the curriculum and it was too late to negotiate for it, especially since the textbooks had already been to print and delivered to the bookstores. I'm getting above a 4.0 in Electronics, but, I still feel like I'm missing something.
What that something is, is reliable storage. Hard drives always, always sucked. That they're magnetically sensitive is bad enough, but then there are all the problems with intolerance to shock and temperature, and the high rate of defects. The last three "hard drives" I bought were years ago: three 50gb Seagates in a row came to me with flaws that caused a total breakdown of the drive within a couple of weeks. I sent them back and got replacements in due time, great, excellent, but they all failed.
I eventually gave away my too-expensive, quickly-marginalised desktop computer and opted for doing as much as I could with rental and public computer time and a USB stick. The flash memory just seems like it never fails and I loath every time I have a thought of "the market sure is looking nice, should I get my own computer again" and the inevitable "what size HD will I get -- oh great what brand will I get, how many times will I have to send it back and demand a working one, how long until the whole thing fails" thoughts arise. Especially when I'm too mobile, now, for a desktop machine and will have to decide on something from the laptop industry. What if I set my new computer down too hard? What if I have to jog with it or have to carry it through the city in the winter? Will my HD still have retrievable data on it? I hate the idea, the very concept. I've always hated them since having to learn the habit of including PARK.EXE in all my close-out batfiles. Before even Windows 95, there was that sinister "you better shut this thing down right if you ever want to see it operational, again" phantom.
And when I go out to buy memory, like when I had to price my first "card" memory two weeks ago for my new camera, I keep asking, "do you have memristors, yet? Well you better get them in as soon as you see them, because I'm tired of paying for this decaying, decrepid shit you call a memory." I'm already pressuring the salespeople to make sure they sell me something good, because the last thing I want is to lose bytes of my flash memory to that elusive cataclysm of writing to the location one too many times. And the last thing I want to do next to that is ever again learn the hard way exactly when and why Windows and Mac-OS do not want you to have your USB stick back for any reason until they're done doing whatever the hell they think it is they're doing to your flash memory.
I think all of this shit should just be fucking thrown out in protest and we should put a boot up the entire industry's collective ass until they start throwing us cheap-ass like CRAZY cheap-ass memristors like confetti in the streets. Because all this overpriced horseshit failing every time you blink or fucking sneeze at it is the only thing I, and I'm sure most of you as well, fucking HATE about computing!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Coming from the perspective of one who does data recovery for a living, I see a huge problem with SSD. Most people have been led to believe that their data is safe on solid state and don't backup. However, they are leaving themselves open to huge disappoint and very high data recovery costs. So, I strongly urge those who migrate over to SSD to be sure to have their data properly backed up. As for the suggestions above with RAID 1, it should be noted that no RAID setup is an alternative to backup. RAID is meant to avoid downtime, but it by no means, an alternative to having your data stored in multiple places at one point in time.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's because most Mac users probably aren't savvy enough to get online (they just use Macs as trendy home decoration pieces anyway). Those that are savvy enough to get online download firefox.
Well, maybe for a very limited set of values of "choke."
I think you'd find the speed increase of my 8-core, 8GB, 3GHz Mac Pro doing web browsing, or one of the new 6- or 12-cores, quite noticeable. Especially when the webmaster of the site being browsed has decided that they're going to dump the processing load on the client.
How do I know? I've got three Mac Minis. One in the music studio, one in the ham shack, and one in the media center. They're ok for what they are, but fast... well, that's not what they are. Even the latest versions are just sort of middle of the road computers WRT speed. The cool things about Minis are the footprint, power consumption, and lack of noise.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Because when you have the ability to run OS X, linux, and Windows programs all at once, you get a synergy that is greater than the sum of its parts. I can use Aperture to process my photos; WinImages to apply effects and stack my astrophotos; all the while running tests on the proper version of linux for my production server code. No re-booting, no "oh darn, that program is for another OS"; no letting windows loose on the Internet where it'll get run over by the first car driven by a script-kiddie; complete, transparent full-machine backups of the linux and windows VMs under OS X time machine without me having to do a thing; bottom line, lots of time saved, convenience is extremely high, and when I'm not inconvenienced, I work better.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Remember how they declared the Zune to be a stellar success, and the news outlets who ran their Xbox 360 research retracted the articles?
I'm running 10 hard drives, most of them have been
upgraded to 2 GB. The expansion slots are all
full, so no more controller cards. I need a *lot*
more storage space. (SATA port multipliers look
promising, but can't find much in the way of
reviews, or actual user experience.) They are
just now coming out with 3 TB drives, hopefully
the prices will come down in a few months like
they usually do. But still way too small, I need
more like 100 TB per drive. Those itsy bitsy
SSDs might be okay for a laptop (that might get
dropped) with insignificant amounts of data,
but not for serious amounts of data that needs
cost effective storage.
nvidia makes a svelte, powerful core 2 duo chipset, but is not licensed to make a similarly small chipset for the core i3/i5/i7. If apple had used an i3, they would be stuck with intel's graphics, because there would be no room for a gpu.
AMD has this problem solved...
This entire "debate" is rediculous anyways.
SSDs are good at being fast and surviving being dropped. HDDs are good at being cheap per GB. Both have their place. There is no reason you can't have both in (or for use with) the same system.
I work at a small-market IT subcontractor where we do project and break-fix work for a huge variety of businesses and hardware manufacturers.
Out there in the real world very few large businesses use over 40~80GB on the primary hard drives of end-user desktops or point of sale, despite the fact that they all come with at least 500GB. Anything other than the OS and applications and current user's profile really should live on the network somewhere. That somewhere is probably on a spinning platter.
SMBs often will have a lot of data on each desktop HDD, but they really should have a workgroup server to do centralized authentication (domain|LDAP), email (exchange|IMAP), user (profiles|homedirs), fileshares and centralized backup as very few have any organized way to recover from loss or damage of one or more workstation. Most users need very little space; Executive, secretary, accounting, medical office data, etc all is small and should really be on a server. Some applications (ie CAD, GIS, medical imaging, media editing, etc) do require large local fast storage, but this can be handled by having two drives: 1 SSD and one or more HDD in the few workstations that need it.
Home users can easily have more than that much on their desktop or laptop, but there's no reason their computer can't have 1 SSD and 1 or more HDDs be they internal, external, or NAS.
Realistically, hard drives slow down computers when the operating system is paging. (For those of us without a CS degree, "paging" is when an operating system uses a hard drive as virtual RAM.) In contrast, the reason why large hard drives is so popular is because people like me like to load them up with tons of video and MP3 files. There's very little performance boost in moving 2-3 TB of MP3s and movies to flash; but there's a huge performance boost in using a flash drive as virtual memory.
I see flash taking off when operating systems are configured to work normally off of a conventional hard drive, but use an additional flash drive merely for paging and potentially storing commonly-used programs.
It's very easy to experiment with these techniques on a full desktop. You can install a flash drive as a second hard drive, and configure Windows to only page to the flash drive. It will run MUCH faster. Likewise, you could install Windows, Mac, or Linux onto a flashdrive, and then mount a hardrive so that it's the "Users" directory.
No, I will not work for your startup
And how long was the warranty?
Frankly most laptops and netbooks don't let you upgrade the CPU.
You're right. Most don't. You can't upgrade your way out of obsolescence, you can only stave it off by not buying obsolete parts in the first place.
So I suspect Macs are NOT at 20% share. Not even close.
Apple has to admit to one of two things then:
1) it has a much smaller market share
2) 75% of its users are motivated to replace the web browser they're so proud of.
I'd go with 1) if I were them - 2) is a terrible indictment of their ability to make software their users value.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The RAM is soldered in/ If you buy it with 2GB, you can't upgrade it. If you buy it with 4 GB, you can't upgrade it.
Impossible?! The only thing easier than replacing a soldered component is replacing a socketed component! ;)
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Check out Step 15 The Ram is circled in yellow. No sockets that I can see.-- it looks like surface mounting.
Way to miss the tongue in cheek. I would've though the wink was a dead giveaway, but apparently I was wrong.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
28" Widescreen CRT TVs are absolutely lethal - the don't *quite* weigh enough to be impossible for one normal person to lift, but they weigh more than most people can lift *safely*, and enough to seriously damage you if not lifted correctly. I came within a few mm of getting my foot crushed badly when one of these TVs 'bounced' off a bed onto the floor while being positioned (TV was totally undamaged despite doing a 180deg turn in mid air and landing very hard upside down).
I've never tried lifting a 32" Widescreen CRT TV but I would think it was heavy enough that most people wouldn't even try moving by themselves.