Apple's new MacBook Pros rumored with 16GB SSD boot disk, white model could be axed - Page 2

and how to do it. My own experience with it is that in use its a pain in the a**. Particularly with a small ssd boot disk, you are now constantly asking yourself what can fit where and if anything happens or you go to change the users folder disk, then you have an unbootable machine or extra hoops to jump through. In any case, there is no permissions repair this way as it currently stands.

The ssd as described is not a seagate hybrid. Either the description is incorrect or they are going to have to do something at the OS level to address the issues of what resides on what disk.

Let's say Apple puts in a small SSD for just the OS.

How do Apple deal with applications like Final Cut Pro that can only be installed on the boot volume and hundreds of third party apps that throw files all over the boot volume? Those applications are compatible with Snow Leopard today. Will they really make them incompatible 36 hours from now?

Partitions can be a useful tool for organizing data, speeding up reads/writes and getting around stupid limitations like the fact that two users cannot both have edit access to an iPhoto library unless the library exists on a volume with permissions turned off.

I back up my 1TB drive to a pair of 500GB drives. Having the 1TB drive partitioned makes that a piece of cake.

Serious question:

If I write to a volume that consists of multiple physical drives does the OS have control over where those files are placed?

In a typical RAID all the physical drives are the same so it really doesn't matter where the files end up. But if one of the drives in the RAID is an SSD then it's critical that frequently used files are placed on the SSD while all the rest go on slower hard disks.

Astonishing that no one has bring this up yet.

It will properly uses the new Intel Z68 Chipset, which has a features called SSD Caching. It will be totally different from Robson and offer Today's Best Mainstream SSD Performance at a much smaller cost. That is the words that Intel used to describe its SSD Caching.

If anything Apple's SSD Bootup will properly be this with their OS specifically tuned.

The multiple hard drive thing does not make sense. I think it is a kind of special cache for frequently accessed files and the OS without the actual files residing on it.

This part of the rumour is overall quite suspect.

In all the hubbub over the potential new specs I'm still amused at the fact that despite CPU technology improvements, SPECint/Geekbench-wise, the new high-end MacBook Pro will still probably only be roughly the equivalent of a low-to-mid-range 2008 vintage Mac Pro in speed

As for the rumored 16 GB SSD, I would be surprised if it was much more than a cache for /var/vm. If you have an 8 GB system and use it enough to start paging (admittedly, that would be pretty impressive in and of itself), you could easily get /var/vm up to over 10 GB in size just from the sleepimage file (which matches the size of RAM, and it doesn't appear to be a sparse image file) and the various swapfile[1..N] files alone. So much for caching the whole OS ...

After drooling over a few mock-ups on other sites I was hoping they would finally ditch the shiny silver but I'm not holding out much hope of that now.

I don't think they will ditch the white MB. The MBA & MBP look cold and professional. They still need a fun, friendly looking laptop to sell into cost conscious schools, colleges, windows switchers, home users, etc.

Well according to Hardmac there is no mention of OS-dedicated SSD in the details they managed to gather concerning the specifications of a 13" model.

By the way, always according to them, the Apple version of Lightpeak will be called Thunderbolt.

If the SSD is just for the OS, what are the implications other than boot time, which to me is a pointless statistic since I reboot my Mac about once a month. What does it do to other OS performance? If I'm using something like Aperture, most of my OS-realated activity is minimal compared to loading app libraries and image data.

A disk cache, similar but improved from the Momentus disk, would make much more sense. Then whatever you use most would benefit from the speed increase, whether it be OS files, application libraries, etc.


Then you are doing it wrong. As far back as 10.2/3 I had moved user folders off the boot drive with no ill effect whatsoever. If you are talking about partition sizes, well, then you'd have that problem even with a boot drive if your user folder outgrew the size of the partition, so it has nothing to do with relocating the user folder.


Does it require that it be installed on the boot volume, or that it be installed in the Applications folder? That is two very different requirements. As others have pointed out, the OS has pointers to locations like the Users folder, Library, etc. If the FCP requirement is that it be installed in the Applications folder, and the Applications folder has been properly relocated (ie, not just copied), to another partition, it really shouldn't be an issue.

But as I said above, I hope it's more like an intelligent drive cache. That would be more beneficial for users who's heavy file usage isn't OS files, but rather app or data files. Depending on how much RAM the new machines can handle, the SSD could also be used to store the RAM to the SSD when you put your Mac to sleep. Or be used for virtual memory swap.

i always loved the clam shell

great post
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Well, there are going to be problems with ANY device sold. I notice that they don't show any figures for how many users have a problem. Without that, it's useless hit-mongering.

I've had a Momentus in my 3 year old MBP for about 2 months now - without a single glitch. Absolutely no problems at all and well worth the money.

The white MacBook is currently Apple's bread and butter in the education market. The feature/price point barrier is actually quite delicate in this market, especially in this recession (and yes, when schools are closing and laying off staff en masse, it's still a recession).

I'm not sure the smaller, slower MacBook Air is ready to insert into the space occupied by the white MacBook, for a number of different obvious reasons.

I will say that I hate white iBooks and MacBooks, primarily because of stains when used by multiple people over multiple years, but also because of how light bounces off of it and impacts your viewing experience. The most recent white unibody MacBook design is actually really good, but it's still white.

The low-end unibody aluminum MacBook Pro, with a Core 2 Duo, could be kept at a low enough price point to be the new low end machine for the edu market.

That machine looks like it could be priced around $1000, just like the current white MacBook. Add in better durability resulting in less breakage under warranty the cost of the milled machine, as well as the cost of bulk purchases of Core-i processors could have finally made this the new replacement for the white MacBook.

I would have to disagree... the cost to repair broken cases for the white macbook is very cheap. And being that most schools lease equipment FMV they do need to keep the machines in GOOD working order (cracked cases are usually not liked by the leasing company). We found that the all aluminum cases are just as prone to breakage during a drop on concrete as the plastic one, except the white macbook can be fixed for $60-100 and the pro costs over $300...

SO I would have to say that this is still a shame if they discontinue that model.

Durability is in the eye of the beholder - those that take care of their equipment say its MORE durable than those that dont...

Yep, so Hardmac had real sources. OS-level management for SSD-booting will probably come with Lion. Looking forward for autumn 2011.