Rumor: Apple manufacturing 2TB SSDs bound for upcoming Mac Pro - Page 2

When I first read this I was thinking "Why the hell wouldn't they just use a bunch of mSATA sockets on the new Pro motherboards?", but if you consider that the largest mSATA capacity is only 256GB, then a 3.5" form factor starts to make more sense.  Pro users need large swaths of contiguous space, so a bunch of 256GB drives won't do.  Apple really does need to create a single big 2TB SSD to make such users happy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by drblank 

I don't know about 2TB SSDs.  I can see Fusion drives since they are as fast as an SSD for a little more than HDD.  2TB drives would cost over $2,000.  Right?  1TB Fusion drives cost about $450.

 

Updated to adjust for 2TB drives.

+1  figure a 2TB fusion drive for $900 or less (by release date).

Only the biggest of the big data pounders would want performance/price of a true SSD (100% random access across multi-Terabytes of data with ms access).

Now spinning the 1/2 grain of truth a slightly different direction....

.... Large SSDs can decouple highly volatile (many write many read) active cashes from RAMdisk and to the storage fabric for a less complex shared store.

.... As you move in to millions of queries a second over the interwebs for session verifications, having a couple RAIDed nTB SSDs at each cloud instance (for apple a couple per country... which would be a few hundred to near a 1000),

.... I could see a market for Apple to have several thousand 2TB drives as hubs for each iCloud instance tracking all the iOS and AppleID interneted 'call home to momma' calls.

.... Therefore It wouldn't surprise me then if Apple was building nTB SSDs for themselves for their shared iCloud offerings (a multi-terabyte hash table, say of all 'good' Siri queries, or all DRM signatures, session tokens, or whatever).

Think about it... Every time I click on an iCloud item, there are probably 3 if not more signature hashes being verified, and if I'm sharing these to the masses (extend Discretionary Access Control [ACLs] to anyone), each atomic item has to be authenticated, authorized, and decrypted from storage, reencrypted for transport to the receiver.   All this key management needs to support millions of transactions per second... seems to me a massive hash of AES keys is the way to go.

Even Siri, where a hash of the voice transmission "Find me the nearest Starbucks" could be computed by the iCloud mothership, which would allow for  'reuse' of past successful queiries (get voice sample/FFT, hash it, compare to my local hash table, if a match, try that, on fail, 'translate' to natural language, hash the translation, look that up on the global 'text' query table.  Lots of lookups of lookups of lookups... saving milliseconds will save 10th/s of seconds eventually and my guess is 10ths of seconds speed up equate to large % of 'satisfaction')

Just sayin'... the fact may be that Apple is building massive SSDs... just not for their consumer products.

Originally Posted by habi 
Why in the hell would they use a Sata interface to the drive??? PCI-e anyone?

SATA's a better option.

When's SATA IV supposed to be released? Because SATA Express just won't cut it, will it?

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhilBoogie 

As long as you keep data on HDD and put the OS + Apps on SSD I'm failing to see the point of a 2TB SSD. But times are changing, and if we 'enter the UHD / 4K video era' we might need larger storage solutions, not fater throughput. The 48 minute docu TimeScapes is 330GB, thus 117MB/s video so current 4TB HDD can only hold 12 of those 4K files.

 

Apple doesn't use their own hardware for their datacenters. Heck, they don't use their own software; it's all supplied by Microsoft / Amazon / Oracle et cetera
 

I think you are assuming Apple is software biased when you say 'all.'   The beauty of a cloud environment and some truly massive data centers where you own(lease) the rackspace is that you can put your own hardware solutions into particular layers of your service offering (e.g. google).

Apple is not NetFlix (a software company, that sees computation bandwidth and content as 'commodity').    

I see Apple building some 'secret sauce' components of their data centers, and the primary components being those that make their core mobile experiences better(faster) and secure.

Whether this rumor is true or not, high capacity solid state drives are the future. Such drives need to become commodity items and I expect Apple's push into the area is focused on that goal. IPad, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, MBAir are solid state. MBPro will become solid state (and perhaps merge with MBAir?). Time Machine -- not likely -- would make little sense. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by ifij775 

Quote:

Originally Posted by wizard69 

Where did this point of view come from?   The Mac Pro is the only professionally oriented machine they have.   Drop that and respect for the entire Mac Line goes down the tubes.   It is no different than Ford and its pickup trucks, volume goes to the F150 but they do have machines, sold at a much lower volume, for professional use.

High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.

Yep. The Next "Mac Pro" is going to be the new Mac Mini with "Optical Thunderbolt". That's it. Build as powerful a super-computer you desire.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer 

 

The SATA III bandwidth is 6Gbits/sec. No SSD drive is ever saturating that bus.

 

This up-to 1GB/sec PCI Express Card from Intel that is a 400GB SSD Drive:

 

6Gb/s = 750MB/s which could be considered the theoretical maximum and not likely attainable in the real world.

1GB/s = 1000MB/s which is a little more than 750MB/s.

And that is just the write speed. The Intel 910 series can read at 2000MB/s

Right?

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/solid-state-drives-ssd.html

Originally Posted by JeffDM 
Huh? Optical Thunderbolt is just Thunderbolt. The connector is electrical, the transceiver is in the cable. The ends are electrical, it gets converted to optical, and back to electrical, a couple centimeters from each end.

Exactly. The only differences are a 10x improvement in speed and an inability to power devices through it.

Ditch the optical bays on a current Mac Pro and you can stick in 6 X 4Tb drives, 24Tb is a handy amount of online video content.

PCI does seem like the way to go for a super fast boot drive though, which generally doesn't need to be huge capacity.

Originally Posted by JeffDM 
10x improvement in distance, but not any faster.

Well, it can be, which is the point. Optical is theoretical up to 100Gb/s both ways, yeah?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ifij775 


High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.

Unless Apple is willing to show the world that they use their own hardware and their own OSX for their servers and data centers, their advertising of Mac Mini "servers" means nothing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter Windle 

How about we forget about the Mac Pro and make it so that Mac minis can be shared via Thunderbolt for x-san to utilise the available hardware on the "chain".

Cheap, reliable, expandable and AVAILABLE !!

Applications have to be written for cluster support.  Redundant hot swap power supplies and hard drives don't require software support.

With the technology coming on line in 2013, Apple could easily make a very interesting professional platform.    There is still a significant market between what an iMac can do and the problems associated with paste together computational clusters.  I really don't know what Apple is up to Mac Pro wise but the could easily deploy a machine with 24 to 50 i86 type cores and when combined with a state of the art GPU it could effectively compete with small clusters at a much lower cost.  

If history is any indicator anytime you can move computation off shared hardware everyone wins.  

Quote:

Originally Posted by ifij775 


High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.

You can find 256 GB SSDs for About $180 dollars these days.     So a 2 TB drive is a possibility at an affordable price.   Now $1500 for that drive may not sound affordable to many but many Mac Pro users would jump at such a drive.   

Quote:

Originally Posted by SolipsismX 

If true, and I think it's has merit, it would appear they are keeping the 3.5" bay which some thought would go away as they move it to all SSD. I guess that's still possible with a PCie SSD card but I think it's highly unlikely as the only option for storage.

I'm not expecting anything radically different; just a smaller case than the current Mac Pro as certain components are shrunk and some removed, like the ODDs. I expect a new "look" but something around that volume and still using 4xHDD bays seems most likely to me.


I don't see how anyone can say that. A 2TB SSD will be extremely expensive over a 2TB HDD which will put it far out of the "affordable" category for most people.

Here is an article from less than 2 weeks ago regarding a 2TB PCIe SSD: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20130128235100_STEC_Introduces_2TB_Solid_State_Drives_New_Version_of_Caching_Software.html

Even if Anobit can help Apple reduce costs this is a professional machine where they will test the HW more throughly and where they will market it accordingly so if it's thousands of dollars for the cheapest one don't expect Apple to undercut that.

Apple really has never competed against the type of enterprise hardware STEC sells.  Admittedly Apple sells its hardware a a stiff premium over PC hardware but at each machine release cycle their hardware is pretty agressive if you look at base SSD installations.     I'm pretty much convinced that they could introduce a 1TB module for under $1000 if they really wanted to.    Remember this is rumored to be a larger drive format so there is lots of space to spread chips economically across the PC board.   

The speed is exactly the same!   

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tallest Skil 

 

Exactly. The only differences are a 10x improvement in speed and an inability to power devices through it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ifij775 

I don't quite get what the target market is any more for the Mac Pro. I doubt the revenues are even worth mentioning in financial reports. I imagine they keep some guy from Next around updating this product so they don't have to lay him off

developers developers developers, iOS developers, specifically...

time is money.

Apple plans on making the Mac Pro a big winner this time around i heard.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by wizard69 

 

Given the above and a few other issues i suspect the article is bogus.   Or at the very least somebody saw something they didn't understand.  

The headline made me think of their fusion drives, in which ssds could make up a portion of a ~2TB volume.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ifij775 


High performance computing is either deployed through commodity clusters or gpu clusters. This product has fallen in the void between those and a desktop that isn't very large.

If a company is running an hpc cluster on some flavor of Linux running proprietary code, it's doubtful that they were ever a potential mac pro customer. In terms of workstations in general, other oems have seen modest rebounds since the drop around 2008.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JeffDM 


It seems like 2TB should be possible in the 3.5" drive size.

OWC's price for 1TB PCIe drive is $1500.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/PCIe/OWC/Mercury_Accelsior/RAID

Pricey BTO option, maybe.

I am highly skeptical on this. Apple did rearrange pricing on various options last year, yet for a 512GB ssd, the first one is an $850 upgrade + $1000 for each additional one. I don't think they will jump to 2TB.

Originally Posted by wizard69 
The speed is exactly the same!   

But it can be faster with optical. That tells me it will, particularly since Intel's working on a 50Gb/s version for 2015.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhilBoogie 


There's simply no way of knowing what Apple uses; I just watch these keynotes* and don't see any Apple hardware. On top of that, there are many articles to be found on what software and hardware Apple uses, although that is merely blog/rumor/analyst kinda stuff.




* 2011 WWDC Keynote screendump

so your refutation is 'you don't know' but people who also don't know have guessed in the past that apple currently doesn't use their own hw in their own brand new data centers to power their nacent iCloud offerings, therefore you argue it's not possible Apple is designing this sort of hardware for their own internal use for future products?

Were these the same people who felt that Apple would never use a custom developed ARM chip to power an iPhone or iPad?

If you're saying, I'm just guessing, well, yes, I am, (which puts me on the same pedestal for all your 'authoritative sources') but there are multiple uses for a 2TB SSD, and they don't all have to be HW consumer based for company that is now making billiions a year in profits in delivering web services, and I'm pointing out that Apple has in the past 'made and ate it's own dogfood' to get market advantage.

Is it just me or is the new forums software really screwing up quoting???

I see no problem with a large SSD, I just don't see the wisdom in putting it on a SATA interface in a largish HD format.     It would make far more sense from the standpoint of econmics to integrate a flash solution with a hard drive.   The thing is why would Apple do this when they can just go out and buy such a solution right now.  So I'm of the wait and see mentality on this one. 

There is one possibility though, that is Apple needs to stay with SATA because they need the PCI Express ports for something else.   I still have this feeling Apple wants to hit a home run with the new Mac Pro and may try to introduce Intels Xeon Phi hardware on the machine.   Maybe not the full 300 watt chip but a special product from Intel just for Apple running at maybe 150 watts.    There are a couple of other possibilities but I consider them to far out.   Xeon Phi would explain the long wait for a refresh.   Everybody thinks they will go standard XEON and I frankly don't think that is in the cards.   

Quote:

Originally Posted by hmm 

The headline made me think of their fusion drives, in which ssds could make up a portion of a ~2TB volume.

If a company is running an hpc cluster on some flavor of Linux running proprietary code, it's doubtful that they were ever a potential mac pro customer. In terms of workstations in general, other oems have seen modest rebounds since the drop around 2008.

I am highly skeptical on this. Apple did rearrange pricing on various options last year, yet for a 512GB ssd, the first one is an $850 upgrade + $1000 for each additional one. I don't think they will jump to 2TB.

Cluster technology is very interesting but even here as performance on the desktop goes up more code moves from clusters to the desktop.    Apple has technology available to them that would allow for a massive jump in performance over the current Mac Pro.   It really is a matter of just how aggressive they want to be.  Just consider the tech that Intel has been public about, 3D memory, Xeon Phi and a GPU overhaul would dramatically transform the Mac Pro.   

As to Apples pricing on SSDs, lets face it they are at times very strange.    The AIRs for example are very good deals.    The new Mac Pros are harder to judge due to the mark up for retina but the base models where not that badly priced at release time.   Of course in the Apple tradition the machines have remained at those price levels for a long time.    There is light at the end of the tunnel though, as they did change the price structure on a few machines recently.    I see that as a sign that Apple is slowly moving away from its old ways of no price flexibility over the life of a product.  

Originally Posted by wizard69 
Is it just me or is the new forums software really screwing up quoting???

Hmm. Do you use the BBCode editor or the richer one? If you'll notice in my posts, I always remove the "Quote:", the blank line above the quote, and the line between the user designator and the post content. That's all manual. I've been doing it so long that I don't even notice it anymore, but it tightens up the formatting a great deal.

Wish Huddler would push an update out to change the stock formatting to the above, with quotes pushed right up against the top of the post and less internal space. 

Originally Posted by Trajan Long 
Now all they need is a high end 17" MBP with 32gb ram, high end video card, blu ray, and 1tb ssd for power users. I know many audio video pros in LA who are waiting for this.

They'll be waiting until the heat death of the universe. These will never happen. They need to educate themselves or no one will care when they go bankrupt.

The 17" MacBook Pro is dead, period. And the iMac already has a video card capable of doing anything sub-workstation that you'd imagine.

I think a lot of you forget that these machines are mostly bought by businesses. A lot of businesses will just approve the requests from whom ever orders their equipment without blinking about the cost of the 2TB SSD. For instance I know a few colleagues who have gotten approval for retina mac book's even though the normal ones will do just as well for what they do.

Quote:

Originally Posted by AandcMedia 

I think a lot of you forget that these machines are mostly bought by businesses. A lot of businesses will just approve the requests from whom ever orders their equipment without blinking about the cost of the 2TB SSD. For instance I know a few colleagues who have gotten approval for retina mac book's even though the normal ones will do just as well for what they do.

This makes the assumption that all of these businesses have truly elastic budgets. The retina macbook pro isn't sold at a drastically different price point. The 13" is a bit higher. The 15" models have always been $1800 and $2200. Even though the rMBP starts at $2200, it bundles a few things that would have been configure to order options in the older one. A higher resolution display, ssd, and 8GB of ram are still configure to order options in the older one, so it's possible that the total cost is similar. The article suggests 2TB SSD drives destined for the mac pro. Right now they charge $850 for a 512 on the first bay. The others are $1000 each, so it would remain quite high, and budgets are not all entirely elastic. It varies. Mac Pros start at $2500 yet there are many configurations especially with the addition of specialized hardware that can exceed $10k. I don't think anyone would buy a 2TB ssd at the likely price points as a boot drive. If anything such a configuration would leverage the portion of users that needed a certain amount of fast temporary storage or scratch space. SSDs have already displaced a lot of the configurations that leveraged multiple internal HDDs + an internal raid on a chip type card for higher performance temporary disk space. Larger SSDs could probably kill off a lot of those internal hardware raid solutions in general, considering a good raid card can add $1000 to that setup. It depends on how much space is required.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhilBoogie 


There's simply no way of knowing what Apple uses; I just watch these keynotes* and don't see any Apple hardware. On top of that, there are many articles to be found on what software and hardware Apple uses, although that is merely blog/rumor/analyst kinda stuff.
 

I guess it could happen. Google is known for building a lot of their own servers. I would laugh if he suggested that they would run OSX server.