Interesting news. I guess this means SSDs will become the norm in a couple of years and we could see computers shipped with 1TB SSDs. My Macbook Air has a 128GB one and you really do notice the speed difference. My 2010 Pro with a traditional hard drive feels sluggish in comparison, but maybe that's just because the computer is getting older too ;-) Dad's Ultrabook (which hardly gets used since he got his Surface Pro) has a Fusion drive and that's really fast too.
Just starting to read that the latest version of OSX will not enable the trim command for any non Apple drives due to KEXT signing and unless you disable a large swathe of OSX's security to disable KEXT checking of signatures to enable the 3rd party extensions to load, imagine the shareholders will have even more expensive bubbly at their annual meeting next year
I've got into the habit of keeping Win7 on the SSD and a few games and keeping the rest of my stuff on some terabyte drives. I am tempted by those Samsung ones that are getting rave reviews but a 1TB SSD is an awkward size to have. Too large for the files I access a lot though not big enough to keep me click happy with whatever I happen to access sprawled across my other drives on a whim.
Bit annoying waiting for them to spin up, not sure whether it's CCleaner erasing something or just that the drives are set to park their heads when not used for a while.
All those PCI drives with their colossal read/write speeds look impressive but after reading the reviews in real world use they don't seem worth the money.
Interesting news. I guess this means SSDs will become the norm in a couple of years and we could see computers shipped with 1TB SSDs. My Macbook Air has a 128GB one and you really do notice the speed difference. My 2010 Pro with a traditional hard drive feels sluggish in comparison, but maybe that's just because the computer is getting older too ;-) Dad's Ultrabook (which hardly gets used since he got his Surface Pro) has a Fusion drive and that's really fast too.
I think it'll take more than a couple of years for computer companies to start shipping SSDs with laptops/desktops. 500GB SSDs will have to come right down in price before computer companies start shipping desktops/laptops with them in. This could start happening if enough computer users turned to SSDs and then decided (and rightly so) that HDDs were the equivalent of dial-up internet.
That is true, read time is more important to me, but i would still like pretty fast write speed as well.
I know one thing, I forgot how slow USB2 is, taking some footage of my old SD hard disk camcorder, taking ages. The HD camcorder uses a SD card and the card reader is USB3, much quicker.
How quick an SSD can load a program is far more important to me than write speeds.
unless you disable a large swathe of OSX's security to disable KEXT checking of signatures to enable the 3rd party extensions to load, imagine the shareholders will have even more expensive bubbly at their annual meeting next year
It's actually a pretty small part of the security: attacks which would be stopped by kext signing are pretty thin on the ground, and would only happen while you're installing some software and have given your password, at which point most bets are off anyway.
It's also in the grand scheme of things not the end of the world if you don't run TRIM.
It's not really something Apple care about one way or the other, as they don't sell (any? many?) machines which use SATA SSDs anyway (all their current machine are I think pci-e). Their might be some tiny handful of people who would fit a SATA SSD to improve the performance of an old Mac, don't because of the TRIM/kext-signing issue, and therefore go out an buy a new Mac instead, but it hardly seems like a major marketing coup.
I have a 2007 iMac which I've bodged a Fusion configuration into. SATA SSD in the main drive bay, SATA 1TB spinning disk via a PATA-SATA adapter in what was the DVD bay (the 2007 iMac has a PATA DVD). It works well, and Yosemite is fine with Trim enabler and kext signing turned off. But I'm the very edge of edge cases, and getting this running is hardly mainstream.
Write speeds are where the gold is. You never write files to your drive?
Sliding down the slide is great fun, climbing to the top do do it more often is painful. If you could slide up at the same speed you'd be happier.
You're really saying that a lot of computer users will make use of the hundreds of megabytes write speed that SSDs have? Large files do get written to my SSD when I download them, but only at about 9MBs/s.
You're really saying that a lot of computer users will make use of the hundreds of megabytes write speed that SSDs have? Large files do get written to my SSD when I download them, but only at about 9MBs/s.
So when Windows needs to swap a memory page to/from the swapfile, do you think the limiting factor is the transfer speed of the RAM chips or the transfer speed of the hard drive?
The problem with one that big is how reliable is the technology, a lot easier to back up 512GB than 1TB. I know my Corsair SSD have been rock steady since the the update a couple of years back or so, but this is still pretty new tech.
To be fair a mechanical hdd can also fail almost without warning so any critical files like photos, documents will always need a proper backup.
SSD's are not new tech any more so should be more reliable, but like any storage back up, backup and back up again if you don't want to lose that data.
So when Windows needs to swap a memory page to/from the swapfile, do you think the limiting factor is the transfer speed of the RAM chips or the transfer speed of the hard drive?
I'm not talking about anything limiting anything, but that I'm not bothered about high SSD write speeds.
To be fair a mechanical hdd can also fail almost without warning so any critical files like photos, documents will always need a proper backup.
SSD's are not new tech any more so should be more reliable, but like any storage back up, backup and back up again if you don't want to lose that data.
Yeah, SSDs will have been made so much more reliable over the almost 6 years that they started becoming popular. Better and better firmware will be put in future released SSDs.
So when Windows needs to swap a memory page to/from the swapfile, do you think the limiting factor is the transfer speed of the RAM chips or the transfer speed of the hard drive?
With RAM at a few quid a gigabyte, isn't it more effective to not swap in the first place?
I've committed to the 240GB Sandisk Ultra II at £80. It nigh on matches the 840 Evo for all figures, has better average writes than the MX100 and just about matches that on price with the adaptor included too.
Slightly smaller capacity, but I'm hoping the overprovisioning is at least as good as with the other two drives. Same guarantee period, so looking forward to getting my mitts on it!
So when Windows needs to swap a memory page to/from the swapfile, do you think the limiting factor is the transfer speed of the RAM chips or the transfer speed of the hard drive?
Okay, I thought that you thought that I was meaning something else.
With RAM at a few quid a gigabyte, isn't it more effective to not swap in the first place?
I agree. Memory isn't exactly expensive these days. I went for 8GBs because I couldn't see myself needing more than that, and I was right. I've not reached anywhere near it, even when running things that aren't light on memory.
I've committed to the 240GB Sandisk Ultra II at £80. It nigh on matches the 840 Evo for all figures, has better average writes than the MX100 and just about matches that on price with the adaptor included too.
Slightly smaller capacity, but I'm hoping the overprovisioning is at least as good as with the other two drives. Same guarantee period, so looking forward to getting my mitts on it!
Just wait till you see the speed at which programs open. Firefox, if you use it, will open in about a second. Virus scans go like the wind. SanDisk, even though it's not as popular as Crucial's MX100/M500 and Samsung's EVO on Amazon, it's still a well-known brand. I've seen memory cards and flash drives by them over the years. SanDisk are, I think, used by Apple in their systems, so that shows how fast they must be. Apple are always keen, from what I've read, to have the fastest SSDs in their iMacs etc.
Just wait till you see the speed at which programs open. Firefox, if you use it, will open in about a second. Virus scans go like the wind. SanDisk, even though it's not as popular as Crucial's MX100/M500 and Samsung's EVO on Amazon, it's still a well-known brand. I've seen memory cards and flash drives by them over the years. SanDisk are, I think, used by Apple in their systems, so that shows how fast they must be. Apple are always keen, from what I've read, to have the fastest SSDs in their iMacs etc.
Yeah, I have one of their USB 3.0 flash drives - 32GB and under £20, goes like stink! Might be bulky for some.
It's a relatively new SSD and has only been available a few weeks and is very competitively priced, even PC W***d have them at this price. I doubt it will be discounted as against the competition it's a no-brainer. But if it ever is, it will be a gift!
I also have a ReadyCache drive boosting my i3 desktop, it's slightly disappointing but it's a 32GB SSD with much lower throughput. I was impressed by the kit though, a SATA cable, drive tray and software. Crucial mSATA drives are more expensive but I have found them to be the weapon of choice with a supporting mobo.
How quick an SSD can load a program is far more important to me than write speeds.
Both are important to me, certainly when I transfer files from the camcorder Sd card, saying that while i have not looked into the numbers, I am pretty sure that a SSD on SATA3 is still faster than USB3.
I really must have a loot at this,
I am trying to talk my mate into getting a SSd, even a small one, i am pretty sure that it will make a difference to audio mixing with cooledit as long as all the tracks are on the same drive.
then again, he needs to update the computer, maybe not such a good idea on a P4.
To be fair a mechanical hdd can also fail almost without warning so any critical files like photos, documents will always need a proper backup.
You don't have to tell me about that. I have had a couple of mechanical drives go belly up and one of them was only 6 months old.
SSD's are not new tech any more so should be more reliable, but like any storage back up, backup and back up again if you don't want to lose that data.
I suppose not really, i keep forgetting how quick the years go by. I just had a look to see when i got my drive, august 2011, so that is three years and they was around a while before that.
Some people still don't believe me when I say that SSD wears out eventually.
I have to stop spending and save more, I over spent last week going to almost every supermarket in Hereford with my next door Neighbour most evenings.
Still her hubby is now back at work, so that will not bee happening.
Not worth getting updates yet as I can not get to the computer unless I get someone else to disconnect and move it out,
Yeah, SSDs will have been made so much more reliable over the almost 6 years that they started becoming popular. Better and better firmware will be put in future released SSDs.
Don't mention firmware
My Corsair was awful when I first had it, found out there was a firmware update for it, but for some reason it failed, so I had to send the drive back to Corsair.
To be fair, they was good, brand new drive with updated firmware. I had no problem for about 12 months, maybe more or a bit less and then i had the same problem as when I first had the drive. One minute the computer saw it the next it was gone, which meant the computer just froze.
I reset the computer, went to the bios as it was a bios based board at the time and looked at the drives and it was not there, the only way to get it back was to turn off the computer and turn it back on again and all was fine for a nother few hours and then it went again.
So i found a newer version of the Firmware and updated, this time it worked for me and it been fine since. Good job really as I do not think they have made another update.
I know the Corsair force 3 was disliked by a lot of people, I read the reviews, but it was cheap at the time and since the last firmware update, I have not had a problem with it at all.
My Corsair was awful when I first had it, found out there was a firmware update for it, but for some reason it failed, so I had to send the drive back to Corsair.
To be fair, they was good, brand new drive with updated firmware. I had no problem for about 12 months, maybe more or a bit less and then i had the same problem as when I first had the drive. One minute the computer saw it the next it was gone, which meant the computer just froze.
I reset the computer, went to the bios as it was a bios based board at the time and looked at the drives and it was not there, the only way to get it back was to turn off the computer and turn it back on again and all was fine for a nother few hours and then it went again.
So i found a newer version of the Firmware and updated, this time it worked for me and it been fine since. Good job really as I do not think they have made another update.
I know the Corsair force 3 was disliked by a lot of people, I read the reviews, but it was cheap at the time and since the last firmware update, I have not had a problem with it at all.
Corsair haven't brought out an SSD for almost 2 years, so I'm assuming they've decided that they can't compete with other well-known companies and are giving up. I think some SSD companies will be better with firmware than others. For example, Samsung, Crucial, Toshiba, Intel and SanDisk. I don't know why Intel chose the SandForce controller for some of their drives for, it's not a suitable controller for downloading from the internet with. A lot of the internet will have files that have been compressed a lot. It's good to see that Intel have chosen their own controller again for the 730. Trouble is, Intel SSDs aren't cheap. Another downside to SandForce SSDs is that some of the SSD will be more wore out than other bits, because of the fact that the SSD is build for compression.
I know the Corsair force 3 was disliked by a lot of people, I read the reviews, but it was cheap at the time and since the last firmware update, I have not had a problem with it at all.
I've had a force 3 for about 3 years, been in countless machines and never any bother. Great little drive IMO.
Comments
Bit annoying waiting for them to spin up, not sure whether it's CCleaner erasing something or just that the drives are set to park their heads when not used for a while.
All those PCI drives with their colossal read/write speeds look impressive but after reading the reviews in real world use they don't seem worth the money.
That could be good news for sales of Hybrid drives for Macs, especially if they have auto trim for the small SSD portion (which I assume they do)).
I think it'll take more than a couple of years for computer companies to start shipping SSDs with laptops/desktops. 500GB SSDs will have to come right down in price before computer companies start shipping desktops/laptops with them in. This could start happening if enough computer users turned to SSDs and then decided (and rightly so) that HDDs were the equivalent of dial-up internet.
How quick an SSD can load a program is far more important to me than write speeds.
Write speeds are where the gold is. You never write files to your drive?
Sliding down the slide is great fun, climbing to the top do do it more often is painful. If you could slide up at the same speed you'd be happier.
It's actually a pretty small part of the security: attacks which would be stopped by kext signing are pretty thin on the ground, and would only happen while you're installing some software and have given your password, at which point most bets are off anyway.
It's also in the grand scheme of things not the end of the world if you don't run TRIM.
It's not really something Apple care about one way or the other, as they don't sell (any? many?) machines which use SATA SSDs anyway (all their current machine are I think pci-e). Their might be some tiny handful of people who would fit a SATA SSD to improve the performance of an old Mac, don't because of the TRIM/kext-signing issue, and therefore go out an buy a new Mac instead, but it hardly seems like a major marketing coup.
I have a 2007 iMac which I've bodged a Fusion configuration into. SATA SSD in the main drive bay, SATA 1TB spinning disk via a PATA-SATA adapter in what was the DVD bay (the 2007 iMac has a PATA DVD). It works well, and Yosemite is fine with Trim enabler and kext signing turned off. But I'm the very edge of edge cases, and getting this running is hardly mainstream.
You're really saying that a lot of computer users will make use of the hundreds of megabytes write speed that SSDs have? Large files do get written to my SSD when I download them, but only at about 9MBs/s.
So when Windows needs to swap a memory page to/from the swapfile, do you think the limiting factor is the transfer speed of the RAM chips or the transfer speed of the hard drive?
To be fair a mechanical hdd can also fail almost without warning so any critical files like photos, documents will always need a proper backup.
SSD's are not new tech any more so should be more reliable, but like any storage back up, backup and back up again if you don't want to lose that data.
I'm not talking about anything limiting anything, but that I'm not bothered about high SSD write speeds.
Yeah, SSDs will have been made so much more reliable over the almost 6 years that they started becoming popular. Better and better firmware will be put in future released SSDs.
With RAM at a few quid a gigabyte, isn't it more effective to not swap in the first place?
Slightly smaller capacity, but I'm hoping the overprovisioning is at least as good as with the other two drives. Same guarantee period, so looking forward to getting my mitts on it!
Okay, I thought that you thought that I was meaning something else.
I agree. Memory isn't exactly expensive these days. I went for 8GBs because I couldn't see myself needing more than that, and I was right. I've not reached anywhere near it, even when running things that aren't light on memory.
Just wait till you see the speed at which programs open. Firefox, if you use it, will open in about a second. Virus scans go like the wind. SanDisk, even though it's not as popular as Crucial's MX100/M500 and Samsung's EVO on Amazon, it's still a well-known brand. I've seen memory cards and flash drives by them over the years. SanDisk are, I think, used by Apple in their systems, so that shows how fast they must be. Apple are always keen, from what I've read, to have the fastest SSDs in their iMacs etc.
Yeah, I have one of their USB 3.0 flash drives - 32GB and under £20, goes like stink! Might be bulky for some.
It's a relatively new SSD and has only been available a few weeks and is very competitively priced, even PC W***d have them at this price. I doubt it will be discounted as against the competition it's a no-brainer. But if it ever is, it will be a gift!
I also have a ReadyCache drive boosting my i3 desktop, it's slightly disappointing but it's a 32GB SSD with much lower throughput. I was impressed by the kit though, a SATA cable, drive tray and software. Crucial mSATA drives are more expensive but I have found them to be the weapon of choice with a supporting mobo.
Both are important to me, certainly when I transfer files from the camcorder Sd card, saying that while i have not looked into the numbers, I am pretty sure that a SSD on SATA3 is still faster than USB3.
I really must have a loot at this,
I am trying to talk my mate into getting a SSd, even a small one, i am pretty sure that it will make a difference to audio mixing with cooledit as long as all the tracks are on the same drive.
then again, he needs to update the computer, maybe not such a good idea on a P4.
Don't mention firmware
My Corsair was awful when I first had it, found out there was a firmware update for it, but for some reason it failed, so I had to send the drive back to Corsair.
To be fair, they was good, brand new drive with updated firmware. I had no problem for about 12 months, maybe more or a bit less and then i had the same problem as when I first had the drive. One minute the computer saw it the next it was gone, which meant the computer just froze.
I reset the computer, went to the bios as it was a bios based board at the time and looked at the drives and it was not there, the only way to get it back was to turn off the computer and turn it back on again and all was fine for a nother few hours and then it went again.
So i found a newer version of the Firmware and updated, this time it worked for me and it been fine since. Good job really as I do not think they have made another update.
I know the Corsair force 3 was disliked by a lot of people, I read the reviews, but it was cheap at the time and since the last firmware update, I have not had a problem with it at all.
Corsair haven't brought out an SSD for almost 2 years, so I'm assuming they've decided that they can't compete with other well-known companies and are giving up. I think some SSD companies will be better with firmware than others. For example, Samsung, Crucial, Toshiba, Intel and SanDisk. I don't know why Intel chose the SandForce controller for some of their drives for, it's not a suitable controller for downloading from the internet with. A lot of the internet will have files that have been compressed a lot. It's good to see that Intel have chosen their own controller again for the 730. Trouble is, Intel SSDs aren't cheap. Another downside to SandForce SSDs is that some of the SSD will be more wore out than other bits, because of the fact that the SSD is build for compression.
I've had a force 3 for about 3 years, been in countless machines and never any bother. Great little drive IMO.