Apple rumored to feature high-speed 400MBps flash memory in new MacBook Air - Page 3

Originally Posted by ksec

8 / 10b Encoding - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding

Think of it as Binary ( 0101010 ) signals Rules for Signal Transmission.

And i was busy pointing other things out i forgot the most important point 6, or point 0.

0. Toggle Mode DDR 2.0 is 400Mbps Not MBps. 400Mbps is per NAND. I just happen to click and read the original Japaneses blog, which actually has a decent English translation below it. And even the source was correct with 400Mbps. This is not the first time AI got Mb and MB totally wrong. And most other new source like TUAW decided to be brain dead and just copy everything AI posted without thinking.

P.S - To all AI, all Apple news site, or even Tech news site, i am happy to provide you technical proof read services for free. Or you could actually make an effort yourself.

Originally Posted by Futuristic

Reading through these comments, I have a better understanding of the limitations of SSD technology. But I really don't get all the hand-wringing about lifespan/durability, or of the NAND chips being soldered to the motherboard.
1) This is a rumor, so we don't yet know what is actually happening.
2) This is a rumor about the MacBook Air, not to be confused with the MacBook Pro line. The MacBook Air is targeted towards consumers, not pros, and also, is at the low end of the "spec" spectrum. I don't think that the engineers were expecting MBA users to run FCPX (oh dear.), or Logic or Adobe CSx, and anyone who expects to run their MBA that hard is asking for trouble, IMHO. I believe the MBA was designed for people who don't have heavy computing requirements, who just need something streamlined and lightweight to write papers on, surf the web, keep in touch w/ friends & family, etc.
3) If we remove price from the analogy, I see the MBA as a Ferrari, and the MBP as a Landrover. The Ferrari is sleek, smooth, and super cool, but has severe limitations on where it can go, how many passengers it can carry, how much trunk space it has. If you take the Ferrari off-road, it probably won't last very long. The Landrover, on the other hand is very durable, can travel over most kinds of terrain, has a lot more storage and passenger capacity. All these complaints about the SSD on the MBA seem to me to be complaining that the Ferrari won't last as long in off-road terrain as the Landrover. To which I say, "DUH!!!"

Point being, if your needs require the kind of read/write usage that will wear out a SSD in a year or less, then the MBA is probably not for you. Get a MBP. There. Problem solved.

Now, if Apple announced plans to solder flash memory to the motherboards on the MacBook Pro line as well, then I would join in the uproar, because that would be a dumb move on Apple's part. But, as long as flash memory remains on a removable card on the MBP line, then users will have options.

Originally Posted by ash471

Thanks for the heads up on max read rates for drives that are SATA II. I don't know what 8/10b encoding is, but I'll take your word for it. I'm a biochemist with some III-V semiconductor manufacturing experience, so data encoding is completely out of my expertise.

The point here is that 400 MB/s read is really fast. The reference to 3.0 Gbps or 6.0 Gbps is obviously someone misunderstanding the difference between read speeds and what it means to be SATA II or SATA III compliant.

Originally Posted by nvidia2008

Welcome to Apple. The only guarantee you can ever have is to pony up for the 3-year AppleCare and know your system is covered for 3 years. Beyond that, it's anyone's guess.

In all honesty no one should be buying Mac stuff and not have their 2nd and 3rd year covered. Even if one thing goes wrong like the screen, motherboard or storage, you've got back the cost of your AppleCare. This isn't sales spin, I'm sure many will tell you it's experience.

Originally Posted by wizard69

As to mSATA their is a card format called mSATA, however it has nothing in common with Apples blade SSD frOm what I can see.

Originally Posted by Futuristic

2) This is a rumor about the MacBook Air, not to be confused with the MacBook Pro line. The MacBook Air is targeted towards consumers, not pros, and also, is at the low end of the "spec" spectrum. I don't think that the engineers were expecting MBA users to run FCPX (oh dear.), or Logic or Adobe CSx, and anyone who expects to run their MBA that hard is asking for trouble, IMHO. I believe the MBA was designed for people who don't have heavy computing requirements, who just need something streamlined and lightweight to write papers on, surf the web, keep in touch w/ friends & family, etc.

...

Point being, if your needs require the kind of read/write usage that will wear out a SSD in a year or less, then the MBA is probably not for you. Get a MBP. There. Problem solved.

Originally Posted by Futuristic

Reading through these comments, I have a better understanding of the limitations of SSD technology. But I really don't get all the hand-wringing about lifespan/durability, or of the NAND chips being soldered to the motherboard.

1) This is a rumor, so we don't yet know what is actually happening.

2) This is a rumor about the MacBook Air, not to be confused with the MacBook Pro line. The MacBook Air is targeted towards consumers, not pros,

and also, is at the low end of the "spec" spectrum. I don't think that the engineers were expecting MBA users to run FCPX (oh dear.), or Logic or Adobe CSx, and anyone who expects to run their MBA that hard is asking for trouble, IMHO.

I believe the MBA was designed for people who don't have heavy computing requirements, who just need something streamlined and lightweight to write papers on, surf the web, keep in touch w/ friends & family, etc.

3) If we remove price from the analogy, I see the MBA as a Ferrari, and the MBP as a Landrover. The Ferrari is sleek, smooth, and super cool, but has severe limitations on where it can go, how many passengers it can carry, how much trunk space it has. If you take the Ferrari off-road, it probably won't last very long. The Landrover, on the other hand is very durable, can travel over most kinds of terrain, has a lot more storage and passenger capacity. All these complaints about the SSD on the MBA seem to me to be complaining that the Ferrari won't last as long in off-road terrain as the Landrover. To which I say, "DUH!!!"

Point being, if your needs require the kind of read/write usage that will wear out a SSD in a year or less, then the MBA is probably not for you. Get a MBP. There. Problem solved.

Now, if Apple announced plans to solder flash memory to the motherboards on the MacBook Pro line as well, then I would join in the uproar, because that would be a dumb move on Apple's part. But, as long as flash memory remains on a removable card on the MBP line, then users will have options.

Originally Posted by tipoo

The second point is true, the first isn't necessarily. If the processor finishes a task faster and gets to idle longer, battery life could be positively impacted vs it processing at a lower TDP for a longer time.

For longer term tasks like encoding I can see the second point becoming an issue, but TB should help out with brief bursts of processing, for example web browsing.

Originally Posted by cloudgazer

Do you expect to do home repairs on your $600 iPhone or iPad? If you need ultraportability then you sacrifice ease of servicing, that's just how it is. If you want something that you can service yourself then'll always be best with a full sized laptop.

Originally Posted by ash471

Why would Apple use Toggle Mode DDR 2.0 if it is only 400Mbps? Wouldn't that be slower than the ssd in the current MBA? Maybe it gives a faster seek time????

P.S. There was no need to post the link to wikipedia. I purposely said I would take your word for it. Your contribution to the thread was that read speeds are even slower than one might think after correcting for bits and bytes. That was enough for me.

Originally Posted by melgross

What I'm concerned about with flash drives is that the methods used today to even out the writes will begin to lose effectiveness in later drives.

Right now, the firmware for this purpose is pretty sophisticated, and does a good job of evening out the writes to all cells so as to increase the effective lifetime of the drives.

But we've seen a chips' life drop from 10,000 writes, to 5,000 writes, and now to 3,000 writes. At a point in time, if this drop continues unabated with smaller and faster chips, there will be a time where the firmware won't be able to keep up. Firmware is just software encoded on the chip itself. While amazing efficiencies have been managed here, once you get to a certain point, there's little more to be gained. Once the chip life drops below what firmware gains can be eked out, drive life will drop.

We are no more than two process cycles away from that point.

Several years ago, Samsung announced that they had pretty much solved that problem with flash memory with their own development, and that theirs was faster, and had an order of magnitude longer life. I haven't heard much about it for a couple of years now. I wonder if they've finished it. It was supposed to be on the market in 2010. The page I bookmarked for that is giving me a "404" error, so I can't find that article.

Originally Posted by ksec

The problem has been greatly exaggerated. Under normal usage, you will NEVER be able to hit the current limit within the lifespan of your mac or your pc. To give you an example, on a 16 NAND devices 100 GB SSD, if you write in 2GB per day, in the WORST case scenario it will take 20 years for you to fill the 3000 write cycle.

20nm is projected to have 3000 write cycle as well, so two node down we could have 1000 cycle and we should still manage, another node down we could go back to SLC. That is still 4 generation node span over the next decade within the current technology possibilities, not taken into account any other improvement made during this time.

Originally Posted by ksec

The problem has been greatly exaggerated. Under normal usage, you will NEVER be able to hit the current limit within the lifespan of your mac or your pc. To give you an example, on a 16 NAND devices 100 GB SSD, if you write in 2GB per day, in the WORST case scenario it will take 20 years for you to fill the 3000 write cycle.

20nm is projected to have 3000 write cycle as well, so two node down we could have 1000 cycle and we should still manage, another node down we could go back to SLC. That is still 4 generation node span over the next decade within the current technology possibilities, not taken into account any other improvement made during this time.

Originally Posted by melgross

That's not true. It also depends on how full your drive is. This is a complex subject.

What if your 100GB drive has 40GB data on it? how about 60GB? What about 75GB?

SSD's are estimated to have about a TEN year life, as I mentioned before. But we really don't know what we'll see several years from now.

Originally Posted by Elijahg

That's not how it works. You don't have to fill each block completely, you can write as little as 1 byte and a whole 128kb block will have to be erased and rewritten. As I posted a while ago over at MacRumors, for a 128gb drive, thats just one million 1 byte writes across the disk. 1 million bytes is about 1 megabyte. So that's just 1mb written, and you've used up one write cycle on every block on the drive. Of course that's an extreme case, there are hefty caches to prevent small writes, and you don't generally go around writing millions of single bytes across the whole disk.

Even so, as I said above, I've had my SSD for around a year, and i've already used up 20% of its life. Again at the risk of repeating myself, that's with virtual memory off, and my media on a separate drive. I'm careful not to write to the SSD too much, but the average user wouldn't know to be concerned about that.

Originally Posted by melgross

That's not true. It also depends on how full your drive is. This is a complex subject.

What if your 100GB drive has 40GB data on it? how about 60GB? What about 75GB?

SSD's are estimated to have about a TEN year life, as I mentioned before. But we really don't know what we'll see several years from now.

Originally Posted by wizard69

That is overly critical if you ask me. The AIR can be used effectively by many professionals.

You seem to imply that the AIR is some sort of toy not suitable for serious use.

Originally Posted by ksec

Yes but as you have said it your self, your extreme cases will never happen in real life due to memcache for small write.

Originally Posted by ksec

Of coz it depends on usage. With 8GB RAM. No Pagefile. No Index, I am just over 10% after a year. And that is with some low usage of BT on my SSD.

Originally Posted by ksec

In the WORST case scenario it will take 20 years for you to fill the 3000 write cycle.

Originally Posted by wizard69

It gets even deeper than that as the file system and the OS affect wear. Plus the user has considerable impact on wear.

That 10 year life is for drives built on 40nm tech. We really don't know how well chips built on sub 20nm tech will hold up. Beyond that these high density chips do lose their memory

Originally Posted by ksec

Your SSD Controller Software is suppose to shift through files for maximum write cycle. So your "constant" data wont be just sitting on a single NAND block for its entire life.