Will PCIe Flash Become Common In Laptops, Desktops? 372
Lucas123 writes "With Apple announcing that it is now using PCIe flash in its MacBook Air and it has plans to offer it in its Mac Pro later this year, some are speculating that the high-speed peripheral interface may become the standard for higher-end consumer laptops and workplace systems. 'It's coming,' said Joseph Unsworth, research vice president for NAND Flash & SSD at Gartner. The Mac Pro with PCIe flash is expected to exceed 1GB/sec throughput, twice the speed of SATA III SSDs. Apple claims the new MacBook Mini got a 45% performance boost from its PCIe flash. AnandTech has the Air clocked in at 800MB/s. Next year, Intel and Plextor are expected to begin shipping PCIe cards based on the new NGFF specification. Plextor's NGFF SSD measures just 22mm by 44mm in size and connects to a computer's motherboard through a PCIe 2.0 x2 interface. Those cards are smaller than today's half-height expansion cards and offer 770MB/s read and 550MB/s write speeds."
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
In ten years we'll be using equipment that makes the current best look like pocket calculators, just like we're buying gear today for a few hundred that would have been worth tens of thousands ten years ago, if we could even manufacture it. Goddamn I love living in the future.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
The real desktop/laptop performance measurement is iops at low queue depth. Large sustained rates are meaningless for all but servers. (I mean really, how often are you going to copy files big enough for these speeds to matter, and what are you going to copy it to that can keep up? Certainly not cloud storage or a USB drive.)
This is sounding to me like MHz myth 2.0
Re:Yes (Score:5, Funny)
I'll have you know I copy big files back and forth all day long, you insensitive clod!
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
Haha, but lots of Mac Pro users do exactly this. They edit video.
So, 0.1% or 0.2% of all computer users out there will find increased bandwidth very useful.
New MP isn't great for big jobs (Score:5, Informative)
The new Mac Pro isn't that great -- and I've been waiting for it. Really had my hopes up.
Flash drives seem to be characterized by very high failure rates. Changing the drive? Unclear this is a user operation. All real drives -- the ones you use for your data -- would have to be external bricks. Whereas standard HD's for the current design go in and out trivially. It's wonderful. Four of 'em.
External drives? External graphics? (3 display max it would seem unless you have external boxes.... yech) Nah.
Best thing right now seems to be the last generation of the big box. 12 cores, 12 more semi-competent hyperthreads, holds four drives, can push six monitors, RAM is (user!) upgradable...
And they finally fixed OSX so it handles multiple monitors correctly, fixed the broken menu paradigm, fixed how full screen apps work... perfect.
The mac pro.... unless there are some real differences between what they say they're making and what they actually make, I think it's the big box for me. My older 8-core can live in the ham shack doing SDR and digi-mode duty. :)
This way I know I can do the big jobs, and without littering my workspace, which I am quite particular about, with bricks and cables. I *really* don't understand what they were thinking.
Re:New MP isn't great for big jobs (Score:5, Informative)
According to some people att WWDC replacing a "drive" is merely a matter of taking the cover off and popping it out of the PCIe slot. Plugging the new one in and closing the cover. The units they have on display features two such slots. Seams pretty OK to me.
RAM is definitly user upgradeable. Four slots for DDR3 1866 MHz ECC. Works like any other RAM slot.
It should be possible to replace the GPUs as well. The only question seams to be that it's unclear how many GPUs will be availble that fits within the form factor.
Re:Ride the Thunder (Score:4, Informative)
No, no you couldn't, and you certainly couldn't do both of these things at once. Thunderbolt 2 is still inadequate for connecting a GPU, it will not keep up with modern graphics cards. Not surprised to see you of all people get this wrong.
You have misread (or misunderstood) specs (Score:3)
Changing the drive? Unclear this is a user operation
Changing everything seems to be a user operation, it's as easy to get in this new box as the old
External drives? External graphics?
Thunderbolt? Which even allows for external GPU expansion...
3 display max it would seem
It's not three displays, it's up to three *4K" displays (4096 x 2160). Where you really driving six displays of that resolution before? You could drive more displays with lower resolution.
Basically it seems like you didn't bother to even
Nothing like an Apple Hater who misunderstands (Score:3)
So does USB...and serial for that matter. Whether one would want to is another matter. Thunderbolt is a small fraction of native x16 speeds
Apparently someone else who knows more than you thinks it's a good idea [tomshardware.com].
Could have saved yourself a lot of embarrassment there with a bit of Google work.
Where is your evidence of this?
That it's three 4K displays? My "evidence" is the Apple Mac Pro specs page which says exactly that.
Name one system EVER where you could subtract pixels from one display and magically be a
Re:New MP isn't great for big jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
You guess? Where does it actually say this? If it can actually drive six or more monitors at reasonable resolutions (4k is silly, frankly, unless you have a 40 foot wide display) without external graphics bricks, that's definitely of interest. It doesn't solve the external drive brick problem, though.
What are you talking about "daisy chain" -- I'm talking about DVI, VGA, etc. They don't daisy chain. Are you talking about monitors that are "thunderbolt" or whatever? Don't own any, don't think it makes any sense to own any, already have a forest of perfectly good monitors anyway.
So your desk doesn't turn into a garbage dump? So you don't knock the drive off onto the floor? So the cat doesn't yank the plug out during a write? So Bubba doesn't walk off with my drives? So the drive noise is muted by the case? So the drives get power and cooling inside, instead of from some noisy-ass switcher brick? So there aren't more power strips on the desk than pics of the family? So I can pick it up and move it without a scad of external stuff trailing along behind it? And this is a machine that apparently is going to need all six of those fancy new plugs with DVI or VGA adapters to drive monitors, if in fact it can do that -- so the only option left is firewire drives, which present all the same problems.
Where? In your desk drawer? Glued to the ceiling? In the refrigerator? Seriously, this "put it all external" nonsense just isn't going to fly. USB is bad enough. Not going to exacerbate the brick problem. If the machine can't operate as a single unit, it's not for me, that's all. You want one, cheers, enjoy. I'm sure someone will want one. I'm also pretty sure they'll hate the thing once they face the reality of all that desk cruft, but I admit, it's only an opinion. :)
With you, perhaps. All they're getting out of me is laughter. It's a dumb design. It's form over function. Something Apple has a real problem with, although sometimes, as with the Mac Mini, they come along and fix it later.
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Ahmdahl's law: A system needs a bit of IO per second per instruction per second.
Given that the i7-3720QM is capable of 20,333 "MIPS" source [digitaltrends.com],
we will need 20 billion bits of IO per second.
We're close, but not quite there.
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Like say, a 20Gbps optical thunderbolt connection? Ahmdahl didn't say anything about all I/O being disk based.
What about the 60+Gbps memory bandwidth in your average PC?
A couple of 10Gbe connections gives you 20Gbps I/O too.
You even get 5Gbps out of USB3
Re:Yes (Score:5, Interesting)
But boring graphs are bad for review sites. If the reviews are boring, people won't read them, and the sites lose out on ad revenue. So they invert the metric to make smaller differences appear bigger. Instead of the practical sec/MB, they use the more ephemeral MB/sec. That makes the graphs more interesting and gets people coming back to the sites before buying, instead of just buying some random cheap SSD without really caring about the max speed.
"But sec/MB and MB/sec are the same number! Why should inverting it make a difference?" Because when you invert a metric, the big numbers become small numbers, and the small numbers become big numbers. e.g. Say you have a HDD which can read 100 MB/s, a cheap SSD which can read 200 MB/s, and an expensive SSD which can read 500 MB/s. So in 1 second, the HDD reads 100 MB, the cSSD 200 MB, and eSSD 500 MB. Expressed in MB/s you gain 100 MB/s switching from HDD->cSSD, and a whopping 300 MB/s switching from cSSD->eSSD. Switching from cSSD->eSSD gives you 3x the benefit of switching from HDD->cSSD! So the extra money for the expensive SSD is definitely worth it! Right?
Hold on. Invert to s/MB and say you need to read 1 GB. The HDD takes 10 sec, the cSSD 4 sec, and the eSSD 2 sec. Switching from HDD->cSSD saves you 6 seconds. Switching from cSSD->eSSD only saves you 2 sec. So in terms of time you spend waiting, the HDD->cSSD switch saves you 3x as much time as the cSSD->eSSD switch. The vast majority of your time saved can actually be obtained from the switch to the cheaper SSD. The next step switching to the expensive SSD only gives you a marginal improvement. (Even if you insist on using relative measures of time, the cheap SSD still wins. 10 sec to 4 sec is a 60% reduction in time. 4 sec to 2 sec is only a 50% reduction in time. Or if you want to be a purist, of the 8 sec saved going from 10 sec to 2 sec, the cheap SSD gets you 75% of that speedup, the expensive SSD gives only the remaining 25%)
Unless you're regularly doing tasks where you find yourself twiddling your thumbs for several seconds or minutes waiting for the SSD to finish reading/writing several GB of data, the difference between 600 MB/s and 1.25 GB/s is imperceptible despite being a 2x speedup. Twice as fast as the blink of an eye is still as fast as a blink of an eye to our perception.
I've been telling people this for some time (Score:3)
Heck, in this thread even. SSDs are all more than fast enough for today's usage on desktops. They aren't the bottleneck. With the lower latency, and good random access, they all seem to work well.
There's a difference between synthetic benchmarks and what you notice on the wall clock, and just because it is faster doesn't mean it is needed. Another area you see it is RAM. DDR3 scales up to 2133MHz by the spec, and you can find stuff of to 3000MHz. The Sandy/Ivy bridge controllers support RAM speeds async wit
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Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
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> Apple leads the way. The others follow.
No. Apple chains you to the oars like you're a slave in a galley.
The idea of putting storage on an expansion card is old as dirt. It's just that Apple will force the issue and give you no other option. That's not leadership, that's fascism.
Will it be a repeat? (Score:2)
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And how long were Apple users using Firewire drives before USB 3 - heck, even USB 2.0 if you want to pretend that's anywhere close to Firewire ? Even now Firewire is a viable interface.
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USB doesn't exist because of fire-wire, at the time they were for 2 radically different reasons, one was for simple peripheral devices, the other was for fast transport of large streams such as video. How USB won is because it was the port that seemed to do everything whereas firewire still limits itself to media equipment and hard drives
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USB also uses the CPU for the heavy lifting, so it is cheaper to implement. Which is a plus or a minus, depending on the use case.
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USB also uses the CPU for the heavy lifting, so it is cheaper to implement.
The statement that USB uses CPU for the heavy lifting is thrown around a lot, but is it still true?
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With CPU power being what it is nowadays it's irellevant. The average computer has spare CPU cycles to burn. I will say that I have an external hard drive case and when I run benchmarks on it using USB2 and Firewire 400 it's obvious that Firewire is superior. USB2 is supposedly faster but not in real life.
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To be honest, I don't know if USB 3.0 still relies on the CPU as heavily. It was certainly true with USB 2.0 - you could demonstrate it easily enough. In theory, it was a design goal, but I haven't seen any real-world tests.
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How USB won is because it was the port that was a hell of a lot cheaper and pushed by Intel
FTFY.
If FW had been reasonably priced, there would now be 1 USB1.0 port on machines for kb+mouse, and 3 or 4 FW1200 ports for cameras, external HDDs, scanners, etc.
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While true, there's no denying that Apple charging a per-port fee on Firewire ports (on devices at both ends of a cable) was a major motivation to get USB2 spec and devices out there faster.
It was a facepalm moment when I first heard it announced and knew right then Firewire's chances of becoming a ubiquitous interface was over. This was in early 1999, almost 3 years before they introduced the first iPod. Apple was in no position to dictate the direction of hardware at the time, having just started shipping
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Re: Will it be a repeat? (Score:2)
This is not some proprietary Apple tech that it even can claim any royalties for. They are just among the first to have it in production systems, they did not invent hooking SSD onto PCI-e cards. The article is just saying that as apple has it in their products, perhaps the install base is large enough for other makers to move away from the s-ata bottleneck.
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Well except that some of us have been using PCIe flash for years. It's not an apple invention.
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Um... what the hell are you babbling about?
At a guess, Firewire.
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How exactly will they do the same with PCIe and SSDs? Explain.
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USB largely came about (or finally became a utilized technology) because Apple made it the only way to hook stuff up to the iMac. The idea of using USB for external storage was laughable until USB 2.0.
Re:Will it be a repeat? (Score:4, Funny)
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Yeah, if you remember, the iMac was dinged for its lack of floppy, and Apple's answer was that you should buy a USB floppy drive. This was ridiculed by many (particularly here on Slashdot).
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Sure they were. People may not have been using floppies to backup their hard drives anymore, but in 1998 a floppy was absolutely the standard way to transfer and store small files. It was totally normal still to type up a school paper and save it only to "your floppy" and put it in a stack of other floppies, and it was the only way to transfer a file to someone and know they'd be able to access it. Plenty of people didn't have internet, and nobody had CD-R's yet. Even USB 1 was fast enough to get the job do
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wikipedia claims
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Apple had nothing to do with USB other than taking credit for it. Furthermore, Apple was a bankrupt, meaningless player at the time willing to claim anything to impressionable fools to stay alive. Worked on you.
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I never bought an iMac, but if you would like to point to a non-candy-themed USB peripheral from that time period I will have to reconsider my memory.
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USB was on ALL new motherboards before Microsoft supported it in Windows. Microsoft required it for certification and then grossly missed their end of the deal.
USB was ubiquitous in PCs when the iMac was announced but was unknown because of MS's failure. Apple simply grabbed mature technology off the shelf and claimed to be the visionary.
The irony was that USB's primary reason for existence was to replace legacy IO yet Apple claimed to be the forward-thinking company that invented the concept. Legacy-fre
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Re:Will it be a repeat? (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple was visionary because they got USB to work as promised/designed.
Back then, it was about 50/50 whether you could hot-plug a USB device into a Windows machine and have it not crash. Famously demonstrated by Bill Gates at a trade show. There's video. Look it up.
The Mac was also the first computer to allow you to plug in the maximum number of USB devices (128) without crashing. It took Windows a while to get there too.
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If by visionary, you mean annoying then sure.
I knew a few people with early gen iMacs, and they all bought external USB floppy drives, because the world was still on floppies.
Everyone knows tech advances and old stuff goes away (they were 3.5" floppies not 5.25 or 8 after all). It's not particularly revolutionary to remove obsolete stuff and people do that all the time.
It's also not especially revoloutionary to remove stuff which is slowly moving into obsolescence early especially when it makes the resultin
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apple wasn't visionary because they used USB, they were visionary because they phased out the old stuff and made USB mandatory. that was the visionary part and it took some guts. you cannot disagree or deny that.
Folks who prefer Apple's computing appliances have — and will continue to — pay top dollar for iToys regardless of what they lack or how they're assembled: glued-in batteries, soldered-in RAM, tamper-resistant fasteners, missing SD slots, all the proprietary technologies you want — Joe Sixpack eats that shit up. Upgrades are no problem — Apple's happy to sell 'em all new shit. I suspect that eliminating legacy interfaces wasn't so much "guts" as it was a marketing strategy.
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At the time they did it you could easily go all-USB on a PC as well, but few manufacturers offered legacy free motherboards because customers wanted to keep using their old PS2 mouse. My new mobo from last year still has a single PS2 port which my 10+ year old Samsung optical mouse is plugged in to.
Apple sell complete systems with a keyboard and mouse and are willing to screw consumers on backwards compatibility with their peripherals. Parallel port printer? Too bad, buy a new one. Serial port modem? Too ba
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The first few iMacs didn't come with firewire. Gradually, Apple introduced it as a premium DV feature--so users might plug in their camcorders. It wasn't until 2001 that firewire was standard on every iMac. At that time, the CDRom was read only, so a lot of people fretted about not being able to backup their stuff.
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Intel developed USB without the slightest concern for Firewire. The two were largely coincidental. Firewire came about because Sony wanted a serial interface for its new digital video standard and Apple had some old lab tech in the garbage heap. Sony made Firewire a success from spare parts while Intel developed their own from scratch. Apple lacked the leadership to deliver any of it but had the gonads to claim all of it.
Apple doesn't own 1394, only the Firewire name. Never underestimate ignorance and
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I do have a question about this ..... (Score:5, Interesting)
From the photos Apple has on their site of the Mac Pro with its cover open, it looks to me like the flash storage used is a "mini PCIe" form-factor. I've already purchased and used an identical looking 480GB flash drive to fit in an HP "Ultrabook" type of portable called the "Spectre XT Pro".
(HP claims the notebook can't be purchased with a drive larger than 256GB, even in a custom build order on their web site, but a technical manual I found clearly showed it took the mini PCIe type of flash drive, so I bought a 480GB from CDW to try it and it worked just fine.)
I've seen a few comments yesterday and today though claiming some of these mini PCIe form-factor SSDs are not *really* following the standards for the PCIe connector? So in effect, they perform with a lot less throughput, the same as any existing SSD drive, except just using that type of physical connector.
Anyone know if there's much truth to such claims .... meaning what Apple is offering here really will be more advanced than current SSD technology, or is this a case where companies like HP have really been using the same stuff for at least the last 1-2 years in select ultraportables?
Oh, wait ... clarification needed! (Score:2)
I didn't recall the type correctly... The drive I replaced in the Spectre XT Pro was actually an "mSATA" type of drive.
I guess it was something like the drive Crucial sells here:
http://www.crucial.com/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=433DDBDFA5CA7304 [crucial.com]
So I stand potentially corrected.... Perhaps the PCIe connector Apple is using here a little thinner and different. Looked very similar though.
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I believe this is intel's "NGFF" or "Next Gen Form Factor" -- I think the trade name is now m.2 . This format which apparently is a hybrid pcie-e and sata form factor. I guess the electrical signals are there for sata? But these devices can operate at pci-e x2 or x4. http://www.techpowerup.com/178188/intel-ssd-530-in-ngff-form-factor-pictured-arrives-in-q2.html [techpowerup.com]
Look familiar?
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/27850/adata_shows_working_next_generation_form_factor_ngff_on_video_at_ces/index.html [tweaktown.com]
Apple seems to have
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Steve Wozniak is the chief scientist at Fusion IO, which makes a range of PCIe flash storage devices, including ones meant high-performance database servers. Woz has gone to previous WWDCs so his attending the keynote doesn't necessarily mean a thing, but I'm willing to bet that Fusion IO is involved in some way with the new Mac Pro's PCIe storage.
Ummm, I kinda doubt it (Score:3)
While the speed sounds impressive on paper, SSDs are really already going beyond what is needed for storage speeds. You can try this by upgrading from a SATA II to SATA III SSD yourself. I've done that, and I even went from a slow one (WD SiliconEdge Blue) to a fast one (Samsung 840 Pro). Actual difference in system performance? Eh, I doubt I could tell you which was which in a blind test.
The big numbers are mostly dick-waving in a desktop setup. I think the advantages offered by a storage connector and controller are likely to outweigh speed.
Also please note SAS 12g is coming out soon, and that means SATA at the same speed is soon to come as well.
It just really isn't that big a deal on the desktop. For SANs, databases, other high performance shit? Sure, there are cases where you need more IO or iops then you can get out of a SAS interface and then PCIe or the like may be an answer. But for user systems, SSDs are already more than fast enough, additional speed gains don't seem to translate in to wall time gains.
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While the speed sounds impressive on paper, SSDs are really already going beyond what is needed for storage speeds. You can try this by upgrading from a SATA II to SATA III SSD yourself. I've done that, and I even went from a slow one (WD SiliconEdge Blue) to a fast one (Samsung 840 Pro). Actual difference in system performance? Eh, I doubt I could tell you which was which in a blind test.
The big numbers are mostly dick-waving in a desktop setup. I think the advantages offered by a storage connector and controller are likely to outweigh speed.
This,
In sports car communities this is called "Hard Parking". People who modify their cars, intakes, cat-backs, chips, so on and so forth but never actually take it out on the track. They compare dyno scores and talk about how their latest tuning netted them an extra 5 bhp between taking photo's of their never-tracked car. For those of us who aren't hard parkers, I have to say it's a lot more fun taking an unmodified S13 around a track than sitting on a dynamometer in a highly modified WRX STI (I.E. I'd
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Whilst it is a case of diminishing returns, sure... but...
If i have to wait AT ALL for my machine to do something it is wasted time in my life I will never get back. Until everything I do on the machine is INSTANT, i'll take any speed improvements they can provide, thanks.
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Whilst it is a case of diminishing returns, sure... but...
If i have to wait AT ALL for my machine to do something it is wasted time in my life I will never get back. Until everything I do on the machine is INSTANT, i'll take any speed improvements they can provide, thanks.
Right.
Way to miss the point. For the most part, the time you spend waiting isn't for disk I/O. It's not about diminishing returns, rather it's ineffective as it's not the bottleneck.
Anyway, as the OP said, I highly doubt you'd be able to tell the difference in a blind test. The only people it would matter to are people who have disk operations that are measured in hours.
Also, you have some serious problems if you cant wait 30 seconds for anything. Seriously, people suffering from ADHD tend to have
Re:Ummm, I kinda doubt it (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, you had good points until here.
Any (good) programmer, artist, writer, or anyone else who creates on a computer for a living will tell you that they hate unresponsive applications. Open a new file and wait 5 seconds before you can see it? It's distracting, and it breaks your train of thought.
It's not ADHD, it's the fact that we're used to, from the "real world", to have instant response to actions -- pull out a piece of paper and you can read it immediately. Put a brush to the paper, and the colour shows up instantly. The brain expects the computers, which are trying to model this real world interaction, to work the same way.
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MacBook Mini? Really? (Score:2)
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PCI drives have been around for a while. (Score:2)
- Performance benefits weren't useful outside niche applications.
- They simply weren't practical.
SATA has a huge legacy, is cheap to produce and
no! (Score:3)
Then from the consumer side, some modified BIOS that only boots off of PCI-E controlled storage devices and then not being able to use Acronis or GParted because it's a custom driver on a custom controller are both huge problems. Not being able to replace it with any 2.5" drive, just 1 single replacement option at a price-gouging 5x charge from the manufacturer is pretty awful too. Your upgrade options go out the window too.
Then it's just some anonymous nothing brand. There are 3 brands of SSDs that I buy and that's it because I don't want the flash chips failing in a year like Kingston SSDNow or Adata or Sandisk or any of those wacky off brand ones. HP and Dell are famous for garbage like rebranded lite-on DVD burners that fail constantly instead of something nice like Phillips so you bet it's going to be a true piece of crap.
Overall, it's a terrible idea.
Two trends reversing? (Score:2)
Most Motherboard manufacturers have been coming out with designs that reduce the number of slots for expansion, this may be a reversal and there's mini PCIe which I'd love to see available in more and more systems. It will definitely push for more SSD solutions in laptops/desktops and workstations but I was also curious about the release of the new Mac Pro yesterday and their expectation of externally connected hardware as well. While they've reduced the footprint of the system I can imagine a bunch of ca
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If PCIE disks gain market share, motherboard manufacturer will inevitably add more PCIE slots, and gradually start removing SATA2 slots, on at a time.
Pundits speculate on a depressingly regular (Score:2)
basis and are almost always wrong. Why should we believe them this time?
If you can, do.
If you can't, teach.
If you can't teach, pontificate.
apple (Score:2)
No.
I doubt PCIe based flash will be universal or even that common for a long time. Hell, one of the tablet/notebook convertible things (HP envy I think?) I tested recently was trying to run Windows 8 Pro on SD based flash. Took me a while to figure out why it was so slow and unresponsive...
Totally ruined the performance of the machine, but hey its cheap!
It doesn't need to (Score:3)
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The Mac Pro isn't for the 97%. For example, those FirePro's in it are $1000 each. The processor is $1000-$2000 depending on speed. I suspect the Mac Pro will start at no less than $4,999, and that's not a price range the 97% will be looking at.
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Apple is the king of put what you don't need into computers. Unless your doing intensive video editing or mass virtualization, you simple don't need the bandwidth that is given from PCIe flash.
Sadly, you have this 100% backwards. Apple is the king of omitting what you need. In this case, they're omitting the SATA controller and connector. You need it so that you have more storage options. They're also omitting a full fleet of memory slots, and normal GPU connection.
But SONY is already doing it! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But SONY is already doing it! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why Apple is taking credit for this new trend?
Hands up who had heard about Sony offering PCIe Flash as an option.
Now hands up who had heard about Apple offering PCIe Flash as standard.
What Apple "gets" is that it is no good innovating unless you're going to market the fuck out of it. Apple didn't invent [GUIs,LANs,laser printers,small form-factor,USB,music players,touch screen phones,app stores,tablets,'retina' displays,...] they just persuaded people to buy them in quantity while the original inventors sat around admiring their new mousetrap and wa
Current generation Flash lasts about as long (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently found out that the newer Flash drives have the same or better life expectancy as magnetics, though. They have enough write cycles for like 40 years of hard use now, so that's basically a solved problem. Also, when they fail they normally become read-only, so you can copy everything over to a replacement drive. 18 months ago I wouldn't have purchased flash drives, but now that they have improved I will. To reinforce what I read, I have watched Flash drives perform reliably in busy database and web servers. Not that the eight or so flash drives in those servers are statistically significant, but it's nice when your own anecdotal experience is consistent with the studies.
Yes, of course one particular drive might last a long time or a short time. I've had magnetic disks that lasted a long time and magnetic disks that died quickly. On average, an SSD will last just as long as a spinning platter .
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no they dont :)
the newest 19nm MLC drives have 80TB for 256GB drive write endurance.
80 TERRABYTES and warranty is GONE.
OCZ drives have 3 year warranty, no TB limit (Score:2)
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Whilst I'll agree it's not up to HDD standards yet. There are two very important things to point out here.
1. Endurance gets worst as the size manufacturing size gets smaller. 19nm is the worst, not the best for endurance.
2. The massive speed benefits more than make up for the size disadvantage. Use SSD's today to store data you have backed up, or as a boot drive for an OS that's easily replaceable, for simply for a cache drive like Fusion drive or the Intel Windows drivers give you.
Don't exclude a revolutio
Re:Current generation Flash lasts about as long (Score:4, Informative)
Not Seagate (3 year)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820248015 [newegg.com]
Not Crucial (3 year)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148443 [newegg.com]
Not OCZ (5 year)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227791 [newegg.com]
Not Intel (5 year)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167154 [newegg.com]
In low-write environments, flash lasts longer. (Score:3)
For server use you're right to worry about the write lifecycle of flash, but you're also right that they have pretty much cracked the problem.
Most user desktop and laptop machines are low write environments. Most bulk storage is a low write environment. The pictures I took last week were written once and won't be written again, but they may be viewed many times.
From a life cycle perspective this gives flash a huge advantage. For instance, a percentage of HDD's fail due to bearing issues. The time until
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Flash is not meant to replace spinning drives.
Spinning drives are not meant to replace reel to reel tape.
The automobile is not meant to replace the horse.
How many failed to upsurp the throne (Score:2)
Spinning drives are not meant to replace reel to reel tape.
The automobile is not meant to replace the horse.
This is storage, lets look I used to lust after those large storage floppy disks Floptical; Superdisk; HiFD...in the end people use USB flash drives, or Optical Disk failures Laserdisk :) MiniDisc, HD DVD...in fast Is Blu Ray success. Lets look at SSD's which are ideal for portable technology, because they are faster , and more resistant to knocks..and expensive and small storage so poor for Desktop machines and Data Centres. The idea that a (storage) technology will succeed because its measurable better by
The Thought and Effort (Score:2)
In 10 years no company will be manufacturing spinning hard drives.
Again impressed with the well thought out argument from an AC, Here is a Ramcard from 1982 by Microsoft http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/300240/the-secret-history-of-microsoft-hardware/3 [pcmag.com] that is 21 years ago. I won't bother with any real explanation, because I'd be wasting my time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=microsoft+ramcard [lmgtfy.com]
Re: (Score:2)
31, but who's counting...
Re: (Score:2)
I think you mean 4TB there...
But I agree, Raid 6 here with 8 new 4TB drives in the last six months. In SSD pricing I'd be astronomical for that but then again I wouldn't probably be running Raid 6 more like Raid 0 if it was an all SSD array.
Re: (Score:3)
Better :) (Score:2)
Your 15 year old computer has a better processor than a 12 core Intel Xeon, better memory than registered, ECC 1866 MHz RAM and better external connectors than 6 Thunderbolt (20 Gbs) ports? Really? I have to see this computer.
In context of the article I notice you haven't mentioned storage. To be fair I consider Thunderbolt to be as useless as a serial port. In fact I plan on sticking a new graphics card in next year. So when I say better I mean it.
Re: (Score:2)
External Storage. (Score:2)
First of all Apple hasn't said anything about storage capabilities other than PCIe flash. Secondly my company has a PB server of storage in their data center so if you are measuring useless metrics, your 15 year computer has nothing on my company's rack of disks. Lastly what technology do you use for external transfers and how much does it cost you? If you say eSATA let me remind you if the bandwidth.
...and yet I am already bragging that my 15year old PC has larger storage capacity than it, and I need the storage *in* my machine, and no external storage does not cut it. The last thing I want is ugly boxes hanging of my machine...its a ugly stupid design. The reality is my *desktop* computer doesn't have data centre storage :), but it has *desktop* storage...the apple machine is a fast nettop I have no use for one of those. As I said I plan on upgrading my graphics card this year too. ;)
Re: (Score:3)