"The new Indilinx controller models, such as this Crucial 128 GB SSD, are just as fast as the X25-M. And, best of all, they're cheaper, while also offering a not-insubstantial bump to 128 GB of storage!"
This kind of hand waving irritates me to no end. There are a ton of different ways of measuring i/o performance, and I'm sure the author knows this. To say that the Indilinx based SSD drives are "just as fast" as the Intel SSDs is simply not true. Let's take my favorite way of measuring drive performance, 4KB random write speed.
Granted this article is a few months old, perhaps the firmware for the Indilinx controller has gotten faster, or perhaps the Crucial 128GB drive uses a different Indilinx controller than the 'barefoot' model profiled in the article, but I doubt it.
If so, the Crucial 128GB SSD doesn't look half bad versus the Intel SSD. If this isn't the tests, the rest of the tests in that particular review have the Crucial doing really good.
If you're interested in a comprehensive review and understanding why the early drives had some problems, visit the extensive review by Anand Lal Shimpi over at AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531. I liked their site before this review, but the detail and writing made me add their name to my 'weekly visit' list.
I picked up a 160GB X-25M G2 for $450 on Newegg the minute they were posted - I have it installed in an otherwise-maxed 17" non-unibody MacBook Pro.
It's an amazing and surprising difference, one that reminds me of my first dual-processor machine. It's not that your system feels faster when doing one thing (although it does), but that no matter how much you throw at it, it just doesn't slow down - a tremendous difference from the chug I experienced on the 250GB drive that was previously installed.
Easily the best $450 I've spent on an upgrade in a long, long time - far more effective than replacing my MBP would'be been.
I almost grabbed an OCZ, but I'd seen enough reports in their forum of odd problems with Macs that I decided to stick with the Intel.
When I bought the G2, it was reasonably competitive with the other drives - I think the pricing on competitive drives has come down quite a bit since then, but the G2 is fast and stable - I have no complaints.
I hear ya, and yeah I've seen the issues related to the Macs on the forums, though I think they've come a long ways in the recent months.
On that note, the OCZ forums are awesome, that company deserves heaps of praise for it's communication with the community. Developers are constantly releasing beta firmware and pre-release (fresh builds) there.
When the Intel X25 SSDs first came out, IMVU bought them for every engineer in the company. From a cold boot, Visual Studio starts in half a second. Subversion got dramatically faster. Boot times are a fraction of what they were before.
Some of my computers are cpu-bound on disk operations now.
If you run an engineering team, make the investment.
Specific numbers (that I used to push for their purchase at IMVU):
Cold-disk grep of the entire codebase: HDD 110s, SSD 7s
Cold-disk svn no-op update: HDD 140s, SSD 14s
Exactly that. I've been a fan of it for laptops for years. I've yet to find another sysmon that can display so much area in such a small space in such a easy-to-consume format. It's also much less of an impact on the system than many other tools I've tried, which is pretty important when you're on battery power.
This way TRIM would be useful because you're deleting data a lot? Do you cope with that by running linux/win7 aside or do you use Disk Utility to 'free empty space' once in a while?
That guy is a moron -- filling a mounted filesystem with large files of zeroes is not erasing it. To actually do so, dd from /dev/zero onto the full device.
A couple months ago I bought a new MacBook Pro and picked up the 256GB SSD option on it. The drive's Toshiba (Apple ships Toshiba and Samsung drives -- I don't know model numbers).
So far it's been wonderful. Everything in this machine (processor, RAM, etc.) is a significant bump up from what I'd had before, but the SSD performance boost is still easy to notice; even though it's not the fastest drive you can get, the impression I have from watching the various videos of people with Intel drives is that the difference -- for the sorts of things I do -- is basically negligible (in order to notice it I'd have to be regularly writing huge files and timing the process).
Typical time from turning the machine on to having a desktop in front of me is around 15 seconds; that goes up if I have lots of peripherals plugged in (as I often do at work, where I end up using every available port), but still makes my older laptop painful even to contemplate.
Of course, both boot time and cold launch of applications are really just for show (though it's all very fast). The real point, for me, is the sorts of mundane but read-intensive things I do all the time: grepping over big log files or large codebases, getting status and diffs out of local checkouts, etc. There's just no contest here; that stuff happens stupid fast, and by itself would make the SSD worth having.
It should be noted that I haven't really paid attention to or particularly cared about write performance; the only time it would be noticeable is when pulling lots of stuff from a remote repo (lots of small writes to a bunch of files), but any write-performance problems with that get drowned out by things like network latency.
I'm also not particularly worried about wearing the drive out or anything like that; Toshiba's estimates for the lifetime of their drives are almost certainly a bit optimistic, but a more conservative and realistic number (confirmed by various places where I've seen it discussed) is that I'd need to sustain a pattern of writing around 20GB/day to have a significant chance of wearing out the drive in five years.
I'm still a little wary of the reliability of these drives. I think it's prudent to wait at least another half-year. It isn't the long-term lifetime of the memory itself, which is fine. It's the tendency of the drives to be dead within a couple months.
Go to newegg and sort the reviews by date on some of the most popular ones.
Smart move. I got bit last Dec with my 80gb Intel X25m completely crapping out on me. The drive stopped being recognized and despite a week of troubleshooting, and trying to restore, it was completely lost.
However, the next drive I bought was an 80gb Intel X25m. The speed difference of these drives are truly amazing
Buy yeah, I now back up my drive to an external disk.
Do you know how they're breaking down? Part of the great promise of SSDs is that they can degrade gradually, rather than suddenly failing like spinning-platter hard drives. Is there a fundamental problem with that vision, or are the early SSDs just a little flaky?
Is there any estimated self-life comparison of SSD vs HDD for "average" computer usage? I wanted to migrate to SSD earlier this year - but I did some research the information wasn't very convincing. There seems to be a compromise in self-life and performance decrease (over time) for overall speed gain.
The performance decrease is mitigated or eliminated with TRIM support. The idea that you can wear out your SSD appears to be little more than urban legend at this point, as even with absolutely absurd and obscene levels of load, they will still last longer than your magnetic drives.
Oh, yeah, BTW, you do realize that it's not a question of whether your magnetic drive will die but when, right? No fair comparing SSDs to a hypothetical magnetic drive that will "never" die. If you're actually worried about data integrity, I'd trust a well-manufactured SSD over a magnetic drive any day, though whether or not the current crop qualify as "well-manufactured" is something that is hard to determine. (I have no data either way.)
Why would you buy an SSD only to do large sequential transfers with it?
Visual FX, video transcoding etc. Rendering times can often be disk-bound, and eat up a lot of time. It becomes aggravating once you start editing HD video, even on a quad-core. For that, the Crucial drive mentioned by Jeff is a win because of the price - the lower random-access performance compared to the Intel drive is not that big of an issue for this application, and even with that limitation it'll smoke my existing system drive too.
If you only access large media files (due to the very nature of media files, you want to read them sequentially from the beginning to the end) and your hard drive is not too fragmented, it is a reasonable assumption that you will mostly access the hard drive sequentially.
However, if you need a large hard drive for a database and not as a media storage, obviously random access is just as important as sequential access.
That will be translated into a few sequential reads by the os & NCQ. No non-raid device gets any kind of speed boosts from concurrent reads -- ssd's just don't suffer as much from them.
Sure, but if you're making a TV show or the like, it's not unusual to be compositing multiple video streams. TV companies have massively expensive hardware for this of course, but this will be a real boon for anyone who makes a living with multimedia.
Professional video editing has developed workarounds for that problem as far back as the 80's. Basically they do the editing on a low-res version of the footage (it's called an "offline edit"), then export it as an "Edit Decision List (EDL)" and then the big computers crunch on it overnight using the original, hi-res footage and produce an "online" edit. Companies like Avid sell specialized servers that have an in-built LCD screen on their case so that you can see the programme as it is being processed.
Online editing is still quite CPU intensive so I don't think that SSDs alone will change that workflow but it might still help somewhat at offline editing.
Quite so, but if you're greenscreening or color correcting in, say, After effects it's nice to be able to work at full res whenever you can. Right now I use RAM preview to get a quick idea of how something looks, but I can see an SSD obviating a lot of the usual disk-bashing for longer previews. For final render, as you say CPU becomes the dominant factor.
I'm using one of the 120GB Samsung SSDs that Apple ships stock in the MacBook Pro. It's definitely faster for things like program startup, etc. (many things start in less than one dock "bounce"), but otherwise not so clear.
Sure wish Apple would ship the Intel drives. Perhaps they can't get a low enough price on them.
Or, alternately, that Samsung would get with the program and do the kind of controller work required to make these things go faster. (Whatever Intel's doing--see the anandtech.com massive article.)
Why are you waiting for apple to ship it? Just go to a store, buy one, and install it to your laptop. It's not exactly hard, even if you are not a hw geek.
Replacing the HDD in a pre-unibody MBP isn't exactly easy, either. You have to take off the whole top case just to get at the drive. That one action voids the warranty, and if you don't do it properly, you can bend the case or damage components or connections.
The first generation of the Intel SSD's contained halogens so Apple couldn't use them. The new ones are halogen-free, so it might be they show up in future revisions of the MBP.
You make a false assumption that halogen-free directives are about being green. It's as much about safety as anything else:
For some applications there is a concern that halogenated plastic materials will release corrosive and toxic gases if ignited in a fire. The corrosive element of these gases has the potential to damage electronics wherever the smoke travels, and the toxic element can be potentially hazardous to persons if they cannot easily evacuate from the area.
Applications where corrosion potential is of particular concern include communications data centers and phone switching stations with large amounts of expensive electronics. As a case in point the fire called “the worst disaster in telecommunications history” occurred on May 8th 1988 in a Hinsdale, IL Central Office facility for Illinois Bell. The fire cut local service to 35,000 suburban Chicago phone customers and was estimated to have cost many millions of dollars in recovery cost. In the after effects of the fire the central processor of the phone switch, which was not directly involved in the fire, had to be replaced reportedly due to the effects of acid corrosion.
The toxicity of smoke is of highest concern within enclosed spaces where means of escape by persons are limited; examples include mass transit rail cars, ships, and Offshore Oil and Gas platforms. There have been several tragic fires that have occurred involving transit vehicles over recent years that have brought heightened concern to this issue. In a February 2003 incident, news reports of a fire involving two trains in a Daegu, South Korea subway station told of how toxic fumes and heavy black smoke prevented firefighters from making a quick rescue of those trapped. 120 were killed and many others injured in that incident.
Yes, and while they're at it, why not offer a MacBook with Windows instead of OS X? Why not offer a subscription music service? Why do they insist on making premium products?
Why not make one of everything like Dell and let the market decide?
Obviously offering one of everything isn't what Apple does.
Offering the _best_ of everything is. So shipping a crappy SSD is dumb. (Personally I strongly suspect it's because they can get closer to that 100% hardware markup they love on a lower-end model, than because it's greener. But I'm sure "green" sounds better.)
I think "best" is part of the perception they market, but the reality is that they off er a variety of products that don't suck. Sometimes that comes across as "high end" because of how many other bag-sucking PCs are marketed as "cheap."
But seriously, when was the last time an Apple computer has the fastest CPU? Or the largest laptop screen. Or anything with a card reader. Or blue ray... Just pointing out that they are entirely willing to avoid the absolute top of the line and have done so consistently.
Maybe it's a margin thing as you say, I don't know...
Why the downvote? What's wrong with the idea of giving consumers a choice on how 'green' they want to be? [Don't get me started on the whole 'green' bullshit.]
Because Apple has decided it is part of their image to be 'green' and a consequence of that is that they cannot use things like halogen-containing SSD's. Apple doesn't consist of hippies; they have a brand name to uphold. It's a trade-off and calling that 'retarded' means you completely missed their rational reasons for not using halogen-containing SSD's.
Jeff Atwood is wrong on the internet... again! Tell me you're surprised. There are too many mistakes in the post to bother correcting. Just read the anandtech.com article if you want accurate info.
For accurate price info you should know that the second generation 160 GB X-25Ms originally listed for $450 but shot up in price due to excessive demand. It's only in stock at stores that price gouge and MIA everywhere else. Amazon, not price-gouging, has the 80 GB for $260 and the kit version of the 160 GB for $500.
The term "price gouge" is counterproductively pejorative. Being able to get it for some price is an improvement over not being able to get it at all, which, as you point out, is the alternative.
The phrase you're looking for is "market clearing price" or just "market price".
See also Obama's elementary explanation of why lowering gas taxes doesn't lower gas prices when gas is in limited supply: the market clearing price is still the price at which the amount of gas that people want at that price equals the supply of gas. Setting the price lower than this will result in shortages. It doesn't matter whether gas taxes go down.
"Price-gouging" really is a terrible phrase for what you do in a supply-bound market. The people who raised prices have drives if you want one, and if nobody wants one, they lose their bet - have unsold inventory. The people who set lower prices sold out their inventory, but now they don't have drives if you want one, which isn't exactly a favor to you either. There are four methods of allocating resources and the method that our hunter-gatherer brains don't understand is market prices, so people think it is "unfair".
The phrase you're looking for is "market clearing price" or just "market price".
Those are definitely not the phrases I'm looking for. They don't contain enough information. I hope I can unwrap this without being too confusing.
First, you're preaching to the choir here. I'm pro-market-prices. I don't think there's anything unfair about the practice of price gouging. I support it 100%.
The issue here is you, and the others, aren't playing Gordon Gekko: "Gouging is good". You're playing Margaret "society doesn't exist" Thatcher: "When supply is constrained then prices go up. That's just the market at work. There isn't even such a thing a price gouging. Stop hallucinating."
Do I really need to spell out why and how it's different than a market-fluctuation? I got into it a little bit in a neighboring message, but I didn't go into the manufacturer/retailer dynamic. I think just the fact that it makes so many people irrationally angry is evidence enough that there's something unique about it.
Thought experiment: if gas prices doubled overnight would anyone get upset at gas station owners? Exactly. That's why it's not price gouging.
All I'm doing is defending the concept's existence and saying that because it exists I need a way to refer to it. If "gouging" is too pejorative then give me another word that actually captures all the relevant non-value-judgement-related meaning and is not just a sleight of hand attempt to pretend there's no there there. Because there is.
Thought experiment: if gas prices doubled overnight would anyone get upset at gas station owners? Exactly. That's why it's not price gouging.
Something's not price gouging when people get upset? Or maybe you weren't paying any attention to sentiment when gas prices were soaring a few years back? People hated gas station owners, and there certainly were accusations of "gouging".
America could buy a greater share of the global supply of oil, if it could pay more off the retail price on the world market instead of giving it to the government. (And over time supply might go up with higher prices.)
Others are replying, but I don't know that there's any idiom needed. Raising the price to whatever people willingly pay is just being a merchant.
Is this the market-economics version of political correctness?
I don't think it is. Political correctness applies when people feel they can't plainly say something that's true. In this case, using "price gouging" adds nothing to the statement that prices are high except a sense of outrage, and my response was merely that I think the outrage is misplaced.
using "price gouging" adds nothing to the statement that prices are high except a sense of outrage
Of course it does. It says:
1. the subject is a retail product with a standard price, as opposed to a market product where the price is determined by bids and asks.
2. the price is temporarily higher than the standard price due to some sort of unforeseen disruption.
3. the price will return to the standard price when circumstances return to normal.
In the present example the product that Jeff says costs $600 will cost $450 within 3 months. Just as it cost $450 for a brief moment 1.5 months ago.
Edit: Also, you are speaking for yourself about the outrage. I certainly don't have any outrage. Not does "price gouging" give me any sense of outrage.
The people who are outraged by the practice will be outraged by it no matter what you call it. And people, like myself, who have no problem with it will have no problem with it no matter what you call it.
'Gouging' is an epithet used by those who abhor the practice; that's the source of the confusion. It means more than "more than usual" or "temporarily more than MSRP"; it specifically means unfair. 'Gouging' is even a legal term, for a practice illegal in some circumstances and jurisdictions.
So by using the term, you've added confusion, including the need for your extra verbiage, to the effect of "...not that there's anything wrong with it!"
(I also think you're giving way too much weight to MSRP. Actual prices to the consumer always vary, even without a bid/ask 'market'. The MSRP -- as a coordination mechanism among producers and retailers used to loosely enforce pricing discipline -- is arguably a more-unfair practice than this market-clearing 'gouging'. So you're using a mildly-disapproving term, 'gouging', for the praiseworthy practice of maintaining a sellable inventory, and an mildly-approving term, 'standard', for a potentially-unfair collusive practice. The connotations of your chosen language are backwards!)
Not to get into a prescriptivism debate but "Price gouging" has a specific meaning, not just "charging a lot of money"
That's my point, actually.
Price gouging is a term for a seller pricing much higher than is considered reasonable or fair.
I'm only interested in the non-value-judgement related meaning. "Reasonable" and "fair" are meaningless.
What other people are saying is "you can't use that word because it's loaded with value judgement." I'm saying "OK, give me an alternative that captures the meaning without the value judgement. And is concise, clear, expressive, and widely understood."
pricing above the market price when no alternative retailer is available
It's meaningless because if you're the only provider your price is by definition the market price. Market price means the price on the market, not the price in a hypothetical fair competitive market.
Just say the price went up due to unexpectedly high demand. It's hardly "gouging" you if the only way people can keep it in stock is to raise the price.
Just say the price went up due to unexpectedly high demand.
I did say that. The issue is that I need 2 names: a name for the stores charging $450 (and are out of stock) and another name for the stores charging $600+.
I chose "gouging" and "non-gouging". Concise, and everyone who read it understood what I meant to say. I'm not seeing any real alternatives being offered, except to replace clear, concise, universally understood words with tedious explanations.
Why the nice name for a supplier who doesn't, you know, supply?
Discount camera stores are infamous for advertising things at great prices to get you in the store but being out of stock. It's a crappy way to do biz and should have a crappy name; "non-gouging" doesn't qualify.
Why the nice name for a supplier who doesn't, you know, supply?
Again with the criticize-without-offering-alternative.
Discount camera stores are infamous for advertising things at great prices to get you in the store but being out of stock. It's a crappy way to do biz and should have a crappy name; "non-gouging" doesn't qualify.
Right, that's called bait and switch. No relation to price gouging.
> Right, that's called bait and switch. No relation to price gouging.
Actually, I didn't describe bait and switch. And, even if I did, the question isn't whether that bad behavior has any relationship to price-gouging, the question is whether suppliers who engage in crappy behavior should be given good labels.
Suppliers who advertise at prices and don't come through are crappy, regardless of what they do after not coming through. Calling them "non-gouging" is inappropriate.
Equilibrium price. The retail price is lower than the market value, which is why it's not available anywhere else. The other stores have chosen their price based on the demand and their available supply.
I signed up for a newegg.com alert and immediately purchased a 160GB X-25M g2 for ~$450 minutes after they announced they had stock. I put it in a late 2006 mac mini (1.8GHz Intel Core 1 duo) and it has transformed the feel of the computer. There are far fewer pauses. Big apps launch instantly. Extremely satisfying.
The only problem is that it started reporting S.M.A.R.T. errors.
If shopping for an SSD at least consider the OCZ Vertex. I've been running one in my Santa Rosa MBP for 7 months with no issues and excellent performance.
I have an OCZ Vertex in my MBP. Great performance, but has definitely gotten slower over time. The folks at OCZ have just released the non-beta 1.4 firmware release that has better garbage collection.
The day I got my 15" MacBook Pro it was obvious the hard drive is what was limiting the performance. I have done a lot of experimenting with RAM disks since I have it maxed out at 4GB.
For example, intense BitTorrent downloading (and uploading) on a RAM disk frees my hard disk from the constant reads and writes so I can have high speed downloads (and verification of d/led data) and still do disk intensive activities in other applications.
I can't wait for the day where my mass storage can have that kind of speed! (and it looks like it's closer than ever now)
Don't use RAM disks -- it's not 1987, you have a grownup operating system with VM and everything.
As long as you have atimes disabled, the only thing RAM disks will speed up is writes -- recent FS operations are cached in memory automatically (and never paged to disk), so reading a 'warm' file doesn't hit the disk at all.
If you really need such a thing, tmpfs is vastly superior -- it operates directly at the VM page level, instead of idiotically mallocing a ton of address space up front (though I don't think anything like it is available for OS X).
you can mount portions of your ram and use them, but you should be aware that the files need to be put back on a disk before you turn the machine of ;)
Does anyone know much about the lifetime of an SSD like this? I keep reading that with all SSD's, you only get a limited number of read/write cycles before they go bust. I can't seem to find out if this is something that should concern the average user or if it's just some FUD.
The speed benefits look enormous but I don't want to have to go through the trouble of replacing this in a year or two.
Intel claims you can write 100GB of data every day for five years before the flash burns out - I don't know what other companies provide as statistics.
In other, somewhat related, news - has anyone noticed there are 256GB usb sticks around (namely, Kingston has one)? Sure, they are expensive - but come on, 256GB! I wonder what are read/write speeds of those monsters. I have 16GB stick and it takes a mini eternity to copy stuff onto it.
Does anyone know if that big performance effect is also noticeable while running a couple of VMs?
I have those dreaded pauses when my VMs(typically 2 at a time) are busy doing something and I decide to untar a file for example. Does anyone have a similar problem?
I still run on a 32bit environment so use only 3GB of ram.
No, I'm on a desktop that i put together. The 32bit limitation is because I use Ubuntu and there were some reports of misbehaving apps under 64bits....
Those complaints about the cost are hilarious. Either the person making them is a kid, or they have no "on-board" memory between their ears at all. The first 5 Gig HD I bought was a cheapo Maxtor at Staples and it set me back $500 about 10 years ago.
The first hard drive my father bought was 5mb. It connected to an Atari 800 through the Atari's 4 joystick ports. It's price was somewhere around $2000. That fact is utterly meaningless when comparing the price of HDs and SSDs (which are significantly more expensive than HDs) in the marketplace. Today.
Especially when things move as fast as they do with memory and storage. Just 5 or 6 years ago I was buying a new 80gb SATA disk for just over CAD$100 (iirc). We've gone from around $1/gb then to almost exactly 10¢/gb. Probably cheaper for you guys south of the 49th.
edit: DirectCanada has disks cheaper than NCIX by almost 2¢/gb as well.
In comparison the average price for an SSD is CAD$375 for ~120gb, so let's call it $400 to make things easy, it's going to cost more with tax anyway. So it's around $3/gb or $3.50/gb which is 35x the cost.
However if you are building a new box and spending $1500+ anyway then an SSD is probably a very wise choice.
Because you can expect that cost to plummet substantially in a fairly short timeframe, based on past history. Bang for the buck on storage media improves by about an order of magnitude every 5 years.
Does everybody here use laptops? Is a SSD still useful if you use a desktop?
I cannot seem to find any 3.5' SSD's, can you connect the 2.5 to an desktop? Is there any performance penalty?
I bought a G1 SSD for my desktop over a year ago; it was the best single upgrade I've ever made to a desktop machine.
When the G2s were released, I put a G2 in my desktop and the G1 in my laptop. Having a SSD in my laptop is great, but the improvement from the SSD in my desktop is actually much more noticeable.
"The new Indilinx controller models, such as this Crucial 128 GB SSD, are just as fast as the X25-M. And, best of all, they're cheaper, while also offering a not-insubstantial bump to 128 GB of storage!"
This kind of hand waving irritates me to no end. There are a ton of different ways of measuring i/o performance, and I'm sure the author knows this. To say that the Indilinx based SSD drives are "just as fast" as the Intel SSDs is simply not true. Let's take my favorite way of measuring drive performance, 4KB random write speed.
Intel: 5923 IOPS (23.1 MB/s)
Indilinx: 1275 IOPS (6.47 MB/s)
Source: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535&p=3
Granted this article is a few months old, perhaps the firmware for the Indilinx controller has gotten faster, or perhaps the Crucial 128GB drive uses a different Indilinx controller than the 'barefoot' model profiled in the article, but I doubt it.