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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."
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'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".