[Macworld]

Post your comments for Toshiba touts industry's densest SSDs with faster performance here

[hayesk]

Pricing? Not ready move to SSD until 512GB comes down to under $500.

[JonnyComeLately]

Isn't this the same company whose SSDs on the MacBook Air are actually slower than the ones produced by Samsung? With SSDs so expensive, why should I trust a brand that is known to be inferior?

[leicaman]

Sure, ignore Apple and the cutting-edge laptops they sell for your super TRIM nonsense. Apple needs to partner up with someone else. I won't buy that junk they buy from Toshiba.

This post has been edited by leicaman: 04 June 2012 - 02:39 PM

[tokyojerry]

hayesk, on 04 June 2012 - 12:38 PM, said:

Pricing? Not ready move to SSD until 512GB comes down to under $500.

Purchase 2 x 256GB SSDs, stripe them and you are already there. And as a result of striping performance that borders 1GB/sec.

[objectivesea]

Wow. What I'm most excited by is the MTBF numeric. If 1.5 million hours is correct, just divide by 8,766 hours per year and you get over 170 years. Can any motor-driven spinning-platter hard drive come anywhere close to such reliability? And are such reliability numbers verifiable and common to all the SSD manufacturers?

[tracyvalleau]

objectivesea, on 04 June 2012 - 05:16 PM, said:

Wow. What I'm most excited by is the MTBF numeric. If 1.5 million hours is correct, just divide by 8,766 hours per year and you get over 170 years. Can any motor-driven spinning-platter hard drive come anywhere close to such reliability? And are such reliability numbers verifiable and common to all the SSD manufacturers?

You need to read up on MTBF. That's not at all how it works, although its a common misunderstanding.

Here's an extremely condensed explanation of MTBF I wrote some time ago: http://mactips.valleau.net/?p=125

hth

[palane]

I doubt you'll have to wait long. I regularly see $1/GB pricing on 200GB to 250GB SSD drives on Dealmac.

Personally, I think the combo of a decent sized SSD and a Double Gulp ™ sized conventional HD is very attractive. I'm thinking of getting a Mini and doing the upgrade myself. After the warranty runs out, of course.

BB

hayesk, on 04 June 2012 - 12:38 PM, said:

Pricing? Not ready move to SSD until 512GB comes down to under $500.

[hmurchison]

This is great news! I hope their yields are good because that's the key to getting the pricing of SSD down. High Yield and smaller lithography.

Toshiba makes reliable controllers and if you think that doesn't matter do some research on OS problems with other controllers like Sandforce (good stuff but can be problematic in some systems)

[cv]

palane, on 04 June 2012 - 07:03 PM, said:

Personally, I think the combo of a decent sized SSD and a Double Gulp ™ sized conventional HD is very attractive. I'm thinking of getting a Mini and doing the upgrade myself. After the warranty runs out, of course.

The SSD upgrade for the Mac mini is well worth it.

I did this last year to my Mac mini (Mid 2010) server model with the dual hard drives; the 500GB rotational boot drive was swapped out with an OCZ Vertex3 (120GB) SSD, slightly over-spec'ed for my computer so the drive wouldn't be the bottleneck. My user account and data is on the secondary traditional hard drive. 120GB is not big for an SSD, but I'm just keeping the operating system and applications on the boot drive, so it's using less than 20GB of the drive's 120GB capacity. Over time, this will grow a bit, but I doubt it will ever top 50% capacity usage during the time I own it.

Heck, I upgraded to the SSD before I pumped the system full of RAM, the first time I've ever done that. I used to say that adding more RAM was the best way for a typical user to improve performance, but that it not the case anymore if one can upgrade a HDD to an SSD.

[palane]

How involved is the upgrade? I know my way around the innards of a computer, having upgraded the HD of our MacBook a couple of years ago. The guide for doing the upgrade (iFixit, i Think) seemed straightforward, but with a lot of careful steps to be done.

cv, on 04 June 2012 - 08:46 PM, said:

The SSD upgrade for the Mac mini is well worth it.

I did this last year to my Mac mini (Mid 2010) server model with the dual hard drives; the 500GB rotational boot drive was swapped out with an OCZ Vertex3 (120GB) SSD, slightly over-spec'ed for my computer so the drive wouldn't be the bottleneck. My user account and data is on the secondary traditional hard drive. 120GB is not big for an SSD, but I'm just keeping the operating system and applications on the boot drive, so it's using less than 20GB of the drive's 120GB capacity. Over time, this will grow a bit, but I doubt it will ever top 50% capacity usage during the time I own it.

Heck, I upgraded to the SSD before I pumped the system full of RAM, the first time I've ever done that. I used to say that adding more RAM was the best way for a typical user to improve performance, but that it not the case anymore if one can upgrade a HDD to an SSD.

[SteveHix]

You can get 480GB SSD drive for the 2008/2009 MacBook Air from One World Computing for $415 right now. (That's a 512GB device with 32GB reserved for error handling, block management, etc.)

[Frank8al0]

All of the drives use the latest serial ATA (SATA) 6Gbps interface protocol.


The SSD lineup offers up to 524MB/sec sequential read rates and 461MB/sec sequential and 440MB/sec random write rates.


Anyone but me see the fly in the ointment here?

[objectivesea]

objectivesea, on 04 June 2012 - 05:16 PM, said:

Wow. What I'm most excited by is the MTBF numeric. If 1.5 million hours is correct, just divide by 8,766 hours per year and you get over 170 years. Can any motor-driven spinning-platter hard drive come anywhere close to such reliability? And are such reliability numbers verifiable and common to all the SSD manufacturers?

tracyvalleau, on 04 June 2012 - 05:30 PM, said:

You need to read up on MTBF. That's not at all how it works, although it's a common misunderstanding. Here's an extremely condensed explanation of MTBF I wrote some time ago: http://mactips.valleau.net/?p=125

Thanks, Tracy, for your most helpful explanation. I see my understanding was quite off the mark, but it makes me think that the term MTBF has been misdefined or is even intended to mislead.

"Here’s how MTBF works: it’s an aggregate of many units based on expected life of a single unit. Let’s say you have a hard drive that is warranted to last 3 years, or 30,000 hours. You put it in a server, and behold, it lasts 3 years. You take it out and put in a new one, and that also lasts 3 years. So you replace it with a new one, and that too.... well, you get it. Let’s say you keep doing that and finally, on the 50th unit, only two years into it’s life, it breaks. You now have 3 years or 30,000 hours per unit, times 50 units = 1,500,000. And that’s your MTBF."

I think my simplistic, though apparently wrong, expectation is the natural expectation any consumer would have of a product. I think the proper measure should be MTBF per unit (say MTBF/U). Using your numbers, a manufacturer would be required to divide the 1.5 million hours by the number of units that expired in the calculated total number of hours, and publish what, in my opinion, would be the vastly more meaningful numeric corresponding to the average expected life of a single unit.