[mr_rsu]

I am not keen on the idea of having a SSD being a part of a motherboard (whether laptop, desktop or mobile device). I am fine with some part of SSD dedicated for the operating system and apps but when it comes to personal and sensitive data that I may needed to work with whatever apps (such as Mail, for example) for accessing, I would rather these not inside a soldered SSD with a motherboard. SSD can be reformatted but previously "zeroed-out" data could still be recovered.
No, SSD must be a removable peripheral, not soldered to a motherboard of a computer.

[whitedog]

I agree this discussion has gone off on a tangent due to the unfortunate remark about how most people don't need much storage. In point of fact, the people who don't need much storage because they use the computer for mostly basic stuff, don't need the speed of a hardwired SSD either. For the so-called average user, paying extra for all that speed is as silly as paying extra for storage space they don't need.

A lightning fast, hardwired, four lane SSD would be of most use to the people who now use gigs of HDD space, photographers and videographers working with large files and lots of them. For them the bottleneck is IO and no matter how much RAM you have or how many and how fast your CPUs, until the IO

[whitedog]

I agree this discussion has gone off on a tangent due to the unfortunate remark about how most people don't need much storage. In point of fact, the people who don't need much storage because they use a computer for mostly basic stuff, don't need the speed of a hardwired SSD either. For the so-called average user, paying extra for all that speed is as silly as paying extra for storage space they don't need.

A lightning fast, hardwired, four lane SSD would be of most use to the people who now use gigs of HDD space, photographers and videographers working with large files and lots of them. For them the bottleneck is IO and no matter how much RAM they have or how many and how fast their CPUs, until the IO catches up they will be stuck watching paint dry rendering big files.

In other words, size matters every bit as much as speed - they are opposite sides of the same coin. Until SSDs are big and inexpensive as well as fast they will continue to play second fiddle to the traditional HDD. The same issue of IO applies to SSDs as supplemental storage. Say you have a 500 GB internal SSD in your MacBook Pro. If you are one of those who still needs more space, an external SSD might well replace an HDD

[whitedog]

I agree this discussion has gone off on a tangent due to the unfortunate remark about how most people don't need much storage. In point of fact, the people who don't need much storage because they use a computer for mostly basic stuff, don't need the speed of a hardwired SSD either. For the so-called average user, paying extra for all that speed is as silly as paying extra for storage space they don't need.

A lightning fast, hardwired, four lane SSD would be of most use to the people who now use gigs of HDD space, media savvy users like photographers and videographers working with large files and lots of them. For these folks the bottleneck is, as it has always been, IO. No matter how much RAM they have or how many and how fast their CPUs, until the IO catches up they will be stuck watching paint dry rendering big files.

In other words, size matters every bit as much as speed - they are opposite sides of the same coin. Until SSDs are big and inexpensive as well as fast they will continue to play second fiddle to the traditional HDD.

The same issues around IO will apply to SSDs used as supplemental storage. Say you have a 500 GB internal SSD in your MacBook Pro. If you are one of those who still needs more space, an external SSD might well replace an HDD simply because it's smaller and more convenient. But you will still have to deal with the usual external IO speed limits. By that time no doubt we will have SATA 3, FireWire 3200 and USB 3, but which will Apple use on their laptops? The format wars are far from over.

[frenchie16]

I don't need more that 256 GB now. But in three years, I probably will, since I'll have more high-def video and other large files.

[richcon]

ahamling27 said:

I hate to even bring this up but maybe instead of trying to make bigger and bigger drives that are faster we can reduce the size of media files with better coding and compression. If you can reduce HD video files sizes by 50% wouldn't you be able to uncompress them faster with a faster drive like SSD's?

Just a thought.

With video, drive speed isn't the bottleneck. Since video is normally decompressed in realtime, as long as your hard drive's throughput is faster than the video's bit rate, it won't have any negative effect on decoding.

The bottleneck is in the decoding: more efficient codecs use more complex calculations to squeeze the same quality video into even smaller files. A new codec -- say, the future h.265 -- that can compress video twice as well as the current state-of-the-art (h.264) would almost certainly take MORE processor power to decode. That's the cost of smaller file sizes.