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Toshiba Begins Selling MacBook Air SSD
Lucas123 writes "Toshiba has made the solid state drive used in the new MacBook Air generally available for use by equipment manufacturers. At just 2.2mm thick, the company said the drive represents a new form factor that is about one-third the thickness of a thin hard disk drive and that is 42% smaller than even a mini-SATA SSD module. The new Blade X-gale SSD series has a maximum throughput of 220MB/sec. and can store up to 256GB of data."
Yawn. Why would I want this? Good for small form factor, but awful if you ever want a choice in which SSD you can buy or want to upgrade capacity.
And I know it's coming, so I'll just throw it out beforehand:
- I don't want a MBA with a slower SSD when I can buy a brand new generation Intel SSD on a PC which blows it away
- I want to be able to upgrade my SSD's capacity at some point
- I want to not have to buy a new computer in 3 years because Apple just bricked my data because it ran out of read/writes because OSX has no support for TRIM (seriously?)
Just because Apple uses it doesn't make it useful. I would argue most of what Apple does it pretty boneheaded. See above.
And btw, my 3 year old Core 2 Duo with a 7200 RPM boots just as fast as a MBA. It may be faster for a MBP owner because Apple decided to (really?) put a slow 5200 RPM HD in it. Maybe launching apps on my system takes a *fraction* longer, but once it's in RAM, it's instantaneous. Standard practice now is always keep everything running in memory now anyway and only close when you need to. So no issues ever there. /end rant
The OS shouldn't care, but Windows is extremely finicky and does all sorts of stupid shit that make installs very, very system specific.
Linux installs can be moved between machines without issue, Windows absolutely cannot without a LOT of preparation work that basically puts it into a pre-install state.