Slashdot Mirror
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."
so with this tiny form factor, is there any way to install this inside a unibody macbook pro? I'd love to go SSD but want to keep a spinning drive for decent storage capacity, and don't want to lose my dvd drive.
come on OWC, make it happen! :)
dave
They will get cheaper. I picked up a 60G SSD from Newegg for under $100 after rebate. In a few months I expect that to be the normal price.
Is it worth it? Hell, yes. For systems where you need a lot of space or battery life isn't an issue, then they're probably not ideal. However, in a netbook they are amazing. I have a Samsung N120 with a 1.6GhZ Atom. With a standard HD, it was boggy. Resuming from suspend would take a minute. Launching apps would take 15 to 30 seconds. After installing the SSD it's like a new machine. Resume takes a few seconds. App launch times is a second or three. Browsing the web is snappier. I.e., anything that does multiple reads from the drive is much faster. If you replaced your standard laptop drive you may not notice it, but replacing a relatively slow HD in a netbook makes a huge difference. On top of it, my battery times climbed to at least 4 hours of constant use.
BTW, the SSDs run great with bcache/Linux. I'm putting together some benchmarks, but even before I run the numbers I can tell you that CentOS and Ubuntu on an Atom-based machine (a mini-pc form factor) runs incredibly.
I've been pricing out a new laptop, and I've love to get one with SSDs, but DAMN they're expensive.
You should price out what an original IBM PC cost. You were looking at $1500 starting price, and that didn't include any kind of floppy or hard disk, and 64K (not M) of RAM. What you paid back then for two floppy drives would probably buy you a decent laptop nowadays. Hard drives started at $10 per M, and 30M was a large drive (in both physical size and storage capacity).
And you had to walk 30 miles uphill (both ways), in the snow, to get to/from school.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I'd wait for benchmarks on this before auto-bashing it in favor of the Intel SSDs, which are are meeting up with decent competition these days.
There are SSDs that are performance competitive with Intel. They are not made by Toshiba. Unless Toshiba has made massive gains over previous models then this drive will not be competitive with Intel or other good SSDs. Most if not all "Toshiba" SSD controller chips are re-baged JMicron ones.
Well, the interface isn't proprietary so there's no reason 3rd parties can't release higher capacity SSDs in the future.
Not proprietary != widely used.
And I'd like to see where people get the idea that Apple hasn't added TRIM support to OS X?
The only OSes that currently support TRIM are Windows 7, Server 2008 R2, Linux with kernel 2.6.33 or greater and recent OpenSolaris. OSX does not support it and Apple's only comments have been a long the lines of "we'll get to that, eventually, maybe".
If you honestly believe windows is more secure then, I don't know what to tell you.
It's been accepted now by security experts (not so-called geeks spouting the same FUD since 1999) for a good year or two now. Go look it up. Also, there are a lot of new security technologies in place that OSX doesn't have.
I do a ton of photo work and iPhoto has a ton of features that no other program I have used has or has as elegantly or usable. Sorry. (and I play guitar and enjoy the simplicity of Garageband since I'm not a pro, I don't own a Mac but that is something I would dig.)
We can argue this until you're blue in the face. iPhoto is regarded as a poor application. There are a myriad of better alternatives. And millions of people don't need Garageband.
HP Envy is essentially the same price as a MBP and very close in hardware at those prices.
Not this again. Just... no.
The 13" MBP doesn't even have an OPTION for a 7200 RPM HD or a Core i3/5/7. And the other envy is a 17". Even fully decked out with a Core i7, 8GB of RAM, Blu-ray, and a 500 GB 7200 RPM HD, it's about $200-400 cheaper than a MBP 15" and $1,500 cheaper than the MBP 17"
Most of the tech you mentioned is for benchmarks or gaming on a home PC. Not average userland. The MBP and iMacs play modern games just fine and have perfectly normal GPUs. I'm not a hardcore gamer and a NV 9600GT is in my PC.
No problem. Let's expand the list. In just 5 seconds, I could name no USB 3.0. No blu-ray. No e-SATA ports. No HDMI ports. That not useful to you?
And sure they play modern games fine. At the lowest settings, lowest details, and they can only play about 10% of the games out there! Good example!
Windows 7 is a massive improvement and I love it. It is still terribly flawed in usability. OSX shines there. Sure, you have to do it their way but that is the tradeoff. I'd love to see Meego or Ubuntu Unity really take off.
You really think usability is superior? You really think that?
The incredibly small buttons used in most applications are easy to hit quickly?
Itunes and Quicktime are good at useability and interface?
That the inconsistant look of applications are good?
That half of the time you hover over an application, there is no tool-tip, so you're left wondering what the hell you press?
Only being able to resize a window from one *tiny* little corner, forcing you to take like 5 minutes to hit it and find it, is good?
I think Win 7 is excellent is usability. But I won't argue, like you, that it's superior because it's subjective. And OSX you can't say follows the HIG anymore. If anything, Gnome is more true to the HIG and is usable as an interface and more consistent. And you're making Unity the example of usability? The thing is practically alpha software and to date the most it does is a re-invented program launcher. Seriously?
Can we install more than one of these in a system and then configure them like a RAID 0 array?
I'd like to connect four 250GB SSD modules together to form a 1TB portable RAID 0 SSD.
Not donwplaying your need for adequate storage, but SSDs cope with running near-full MUCH better than HDDs, since fragmentation is a non-issue.
Like much common knowledge, this isn't accurate.
You don't suffer from one aspect of fragmentation -- the heads don't have to move and the disk spin into a new position.
However, you do still suffer from excessive continuation blocks on a fragmented drive, with both loss of space and a slight loss of speed as a result.
But even worse, for an SSD is another factor: There's a fixed amount of write cycles per block.
As a disk gets near full, this causes two problems:
TRIM helps with the second problem in that you tell the drive which blocks are really free so it can reshuffle and pre-erase sectors in idle time,
but the effectiveness of TRIM goes down as the disk fills up (there are fewer sectors that can be pre-erased), and on a nearly full disk, it only takes a few minutes of high activity to make the background garbage collection not being able to keep up, and you get serious stuttering as a result. Strange as it may seem, the worst case random write access is far higher for an SSD than for a HDD, and that's where you'll feel the pain as a disk gets close to full.
In fact, it's recommended to leave parts of an SSD unpartitioned to give the wear leveling and garbage collecting routines more space to work with. ("Good" drives already have 20% or more set aside for a combination of wear leveling, garbage collection and bad block mapping, but the current crop of consumer drives only have around 5-7%, and really need more, especially as the drives mature and bad blocks have to be remapped.)
So no, you shouldn't fill an SSD - at least not if you use it for random write. If you use it for store-once-read-many, it doesn't matter much, but a 98% full OS SSD drive is going to hurt -- bad.