81–90 of 131 posts
Whoa, check out that Samsung NF1 form-factor [0]. Looks like you could pack a ton of small finger-sized SSD drives vertically into a small space. [0] https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13752/IMGP2727_575px.jpg This is one way in which it's a cool time to be alive. I'll never forget circa 1996 when I waited 20+ minutes for my Apple Performa 550 to read and load a 30MB file from the scsi disk into memory. All so quickti…
I've been following the news and it's amazing how SSDs are still progressing, a bit slower but similar to Moore's Law. Prices for Samsung SSD 1TB external USB products: - 2015 $600: Samsung T1 http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/samsung-portable-ssd... - 2016 $430: Samsung T3 https://www.storagereview.com/samsung_portable_ssd_t3_review - 2018 $200: Samsung T5 https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/12/samsung-t5-po…
Meanwhile Apple is charging $1,200 for a 1 TB MacBook upgrade. Hoping this year we see a significant jump in consumer availability of these drives. I’ve been using a 512gb laptop since 2010 at least. Would be nice to start seeing multi-terrabyte drives in devices besides after market or external drives.
This is specifically one of the reasons I ended up switching to a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga, even though I'd planned to buy the new MacBook Air. The Thinkpad's SSD is officially user-replaceable and I bought a 2TB WD Blue SSD for less than a third of the cost of Apple's upgrade. Even an NVMe SSD would have been half the price of Apple.
One caveat is that although Lenovo has excellent official repair videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqrspYc21PY), I must be doing something wrong, the Phillips & JIS heads in my iFixit Mako toolkit don't seem to fit/grip the Thinkpad's SSD screw. I'm worried I'll strip the screw if I keep trying, so I guess I'll take it to a Lenovo repair shop for some help.
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To be fair, the $200 1TB SSD linked above is just a standard 2.5" SSD where the Apple SSDs are M.2 with triple the I/O speeds. These Apple(s) can't be compared to the list of oranges above.
No it is not, I linked to the external Thunderbolt SSD (last one) so there are many more pieces involved in the Samsung SSD. But it's true that the Apple one is a lot faster since it's internal.
It's also not a 2.5" drive since it's obviously smaller.
I've been following the news and it's amazing how SSDs are still progressing, a bit slower but similar to Moore's Law. Prices for Samsung SSD 1TB external USB products: - 2015 $600: Samsung T1 http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/samsung-portable-ssd... - 2016 $430: Samsung T3 https://www.storagereview.com/samsung_portable_ssd_t3_review - 2018 $200: Samsung T5 https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/12/samsung-t5-po…
Meanwhile Apple is charging $1,200 for a 1 TB MacBook upgrade. Hoping this year we see a significant jump in consumer availability of these drives. I’ve been using a 512gb laptop since 2010 at least. Would be nice to start seeing multi-terrabyte drives in devices besides after market or external drives.
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SSDs consume more, not less power, to comparable spinning HDs, especially in always-on scenarios. Once started, the amount of power required to keep a platter spinning is miniscule.
I don't think that's true https://techreport.com/r.x/wd-red-4tb/power-idle.gif
Two interesting updates based on what's been announced so far in 2019: PCIe 4.0 will be arriving in the consumer market this year, with a new generation of AMD Ryzen CPUs providing host support, and at least one or two consumer-class NVMe SSD controllers supporting PCIe 4.0 should be ready to start shipping in retail products by the end of the year. (The enterprise/datacenter storage market's transition is already we…
solid state NAS not not laughable, just expansive. RAID 10 a few NVME and you can get decent throughput (and storage size) with existing technology.
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This is the new Apple RAM surcharge — remember back when Apple let you swap out DIMMs, they would charge 3-5x market rate betting you wouldn’t. Now they’re doing it on SSDs but you can’t get away :) If you follow the r/buildapcsales it’s pretty eats to get a 1TB 2.5” SSD from a top manufacturer for under $120, and M.2 for $20-30 more. I just got a Crucial MX500 1TB for $114 all in.
I would counter that the SSD's aren't entirely the same. The most comparable consumer NVME M.2 would be the 960 pro and it's still around $300. Definitely cheaper than Apple, but it's also not in the $150 range for the same performance.
Two interesting updates based on what's been announced so far in 2019: PCIe 4.0 will be arriving in the consumer market this year, with a new generation of AMD Ryzen CPUs providing host support, and at least one or two consumer-class NVMe SSD controllers supporting PCIe 4.0 should be ready to start shipping in retail products by the end of the year. (The enterprise/datacenter storage market's transition is already we…
Not _quite_ consumer, but we run a QNAP TES-3085U at work. Fully populated with 24 x 4tb EVO drives ends up being way faster and cheaper than our spindle based EMC. (although less reliability since it won't survive a cpu failure).
Why is there competition in the SSD market but not in the RAM market?
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I would counter that the SSD's aren't entirely the same. The most comparable consumer NVME M.2 would be the 960 pro and it's still around $300. Definitely cheaper than Apple, but it's also not in the $150 range for the same performance.
99% of the time SSDs are a boolean: "Do you have a SSD? Yes/No" and performance between different SSDs is basically unnoticeable. Change my mind
Relative to each other what really matters are your 4K random read/write IOPS and some measure of reliability. Back in the day there were in fact huge differences between certain SSDs (Samsung controllers vs. Indilinx Barefoot [1] back in the early '10s). Today it's a non-issue.
SSDs years ago saturated the SATA III bus with respect to peak transfers. We're talking an order of magnitude these days, with SATA capping out at 550-600MB/s burst (my MX500) vs NVMe's 3GB/sec (970 PRO). That doesn't paint the real picture to a large extent because 4K random IO is still Large DRAM buffers vs. unbuffered can make a big difference too. Reliability these days from any of the big players is usually very good, since their NAND only comes from a handful of big players -- ditto for the controllers. I guess if you buy shady "Kingston" knockoff SSDs with recycled NAND that's a different matter.
tl:dr; yep, you're right. Any modern SSD from a big player is a good bet, beyond that it's just gamesmanship.