
The Crucial/Micron M500 Review – 960GB SSD for $600 - jseliger
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6884/crucial-micron-m500-review-960gb-480gb-240gb-120gb
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bitcartel
I bet MBP Retina owners would love to upgrade their machines with this SSD.

Oh wait, they can't, because Apple came up with their own butchered SATA
interface instead of using the standard one.

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rayiner
I bet the 98% of rMBP owners who will never upgrade their SSD appreciate the
size reduction instead.

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bcoates
Really? I've wound up doing a drive swap on every laptop, and almost every PC
or server I've ever owned, sometimes more than once. I might have a higher
propensity to do that than average, but surely drives are just behind
batteries for "most replaced component"

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sliverstorm
Dunno about you, but I just use network storage. Cheaper, more appropriate for
things that take a lot of space, and available to every computer on the
network.

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Einherji
I'm curious, as someone with a 512GB SSD, and only using about 20% of that,
does anyone actually need this sort of capacity? The obvious answer is if you
want to keep a lot of media on the drive but in that case the benefits over an
HDD are insignificant, and in my opinion not worth the price premium. Maybe
this is mainly for the enterprise space and servers?

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obviouslygreen
While I agree that it seems a bit excessive, one valid potential use case
would be people who need to keep a lot of VM's around. I don't personally have
nearly enough to require that kind of space, but I can imagine some people
might; for example, having a large set of Windows configurations for
application or website testing.

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Einherji
I guess that makes sense. We can at least all agree that having options like
this on the market is a good thing, as this will most likely also drive down
prices on smaller capacity drives.

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obviouslygreen
Yep, it'll be great to see the prices keep coming down. My main workstation
has a 128GB SSD which is split between Linux (for work) and Windows (for
Blizzard games); in this situation a 256GB would be a lot more comfortable.

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snaky
And not only price is good

>In theory, Windows 8's BitLocker should leverage the M500's hardware
encryption engine instead of using a software encryption layer on top of it.

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jwr
I don't see how the built-in encryption is useful to anyone. It's not
auditable: how do you know if your data actually gets encrypted?

That is not something I'd trust.

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bcoates
Are there no low-level commands to access the stored cyphertext?

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wmf
AFAIK no. If the drive hasn't been unlocked with the proper keys it just
refuses any reads/writes.

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snaky
If that so, how could you boot from such drive?

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Stratoscope
You have to enter the hard drive password when you boot.

On my ThinkPads, I set the power-on password and the hard drive passwords all
the same. Then I enter the power-on password and it feeds that password to all
the hard drives too. (I have three SSDs in my W520.)

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shocks
Are Marvell controllers any good?

My old Marvell SATA controllers were dogshit.

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Freaky
I've been running an old Supermicro 8-port MV88SX6081-based card on
FreeBSD+ZFS since about 2008 - never had a problem. Same controller was used
by Sun in their venerable 48-drive X4500 "Thumper" servers, too.

Not sure that's entirely relevant information in this case though :P

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rbanffy
It seems to be a bit of overkill. Does anyone know of a decent hybrid drive
with 32+ GB of SSD storage and a reasonable HDD that look like 2 separate
devices to the computer?

