Do you have a link for Apple's 1TB upgrade, I can't find it anywhere!
They have it on the Mac Pro order page for $800. They don't have an aftermarket upgrade but if you enquired about it, a store might be willing to do it for you. They should offer an aftermarket service on their website or even just the bare drive for Mac Pro owners as it can be installed easily. It might cost a bit extra as they would either be taking your old used SSD vs an unused one at the time of ordering or not taking your old storage back.
Make sure you have energy saver sleep set to never. USB is slower than TB but should be enough for HDDs.
They have it on the Mac Pro order page for $800. They don't have an aftermarket upgrade but if you enquired about it, a store might be willing to do it for you. They should offer an aftermarket service on their website or even just the bare drive for Mac Pro owners as it can be installed easily. It might cost a bit extra as they would either be taking your old used SSD vs an unused one at the time of ordering or not taking your old storage back.
Thanks for the reply
No sleep: Yep I did that and i also tried a never sleep utility that had a user time setting to keep awake. They still would power off at random.
Speed: It was far more issues than test speed. Benchmark tests showed them to fast enough for sure but in a real world test with FCPro X using HD they were nowhere near performing as advertised, 4K forget it. The exact same drives on the TB dock can chew through 4K video like a knife through butter. I began to wonder if a) the nMP has a USB3 issue or b) USB3 is not good at certain things such as video editing. I have zero experience of USB other than the usual suspects, as I always used FireWire in the past for real work.
Re Apple SSDs: Ah, I thought people were seeing an aftermarket product from Apple as I kept reading reviews saying OWC's 1TB were more than 'Apple's'. I guess it is not really fair to judge OWC's price by comparing with a BTO part, not that I have every checked to see if that's the norm that Apple price BTO parts better than after sales of same product boxed, but I would expect Apple would jack the price up on a stand alone product. As an asside It would be nice if there were a trade in for the existing SSDs in such purchase, whoever they were from, given there is no docking ability unless some one comes up with an adapter.
"A single PCIe 2.0 lane offers a maximum of 500MB/s of bandwidth in either direction (1GB/s aggregate), which is enough for the real world max transfer rates over USB 3.0. Do keep this limitation in mind if you’re thinking about populating all four USB 3.0 ports with high-speed storage with the intent of building a low-cost Thunderbolt alternative. You’ll be bound by the performance of a single PCIe 2.0 lane."
The Thunderbolt ports get more bandwidth allocated to them. USB 3 does perform more slowly than Thunderbolt though as shown here:
I would expect Apple would jack the price up on a stand alone product.
Apple gets the advantage at the BTO stage by including the base storage in the price so when they charge $800 for 1TB, it's really $800 for 768GB as they are keeping the base 256GB you paid for. That's why it's harder for 3rd parties compete with them for the mainstream storage and RAM upgrades. It's only when you get to the much higher upgrades like 32GB RAM or 2TB SSD that deducting the base size prices doesn't negate how much cheaper they are.
As an asside It would be nice if there were a trade in for the existing SSDs in such purchase, whoever they were from, given there is no docking ability unless some one comes up with an adapter.
I don't know why Apple doesn't have a service for the SSD like they do for batteries. Some people will have bought too small a storage and just want a bigger one. Maybe there's not enough demand for it to be worthwhile.
I don’t care about external drives. I care about LARGER drives and cheaper SSDs.
There’s now a 6TB from WD, apparently, but the biggest SSDs can’t even match that. Have prices even been going down in the last few years?
Quite.
Why is storage capacity so slow to increase? Ditto storage in iOS devices? We had 160GB in the iPod classic years and years ago. We should be at 1TB by now. And in SSDs, why do they still trail traditional hard disks so badly? We should be at affordable 3TB SSDs in iMacs by now.
It’s all so slow. Ditto battery life. Storage and battery life are the two big laggards of technology. I want an iPad with 3TB. I want an iPhone with 1TB and a week's battery life, regardless of what I throw at it. Personal hotspot on the whole time, every single app with background updating, intense games, bluetooth on, LTE on, etc. and 85% charge at the end of day one.
Why is storage capacity so slow to increase? Ditto storage in iOS devices? We had 160GB in the iPod classic years and years ago. We should be at 1TB by now. And in SSDs, why do they still trail traditional hard disks so badly? We should be at affordable 3TB SSDs in iMacs by now.
It’s all so slow. Ditto battery life. Storage and battery life are the two big laggards of technology. I want an iPad with 3TB. I want an iPhone with 1TB and a week's battery life, regardless of what I throw at it. Personal hotspot on the whole time, every single app with background updating, intense games, bluetooth on, LTE on, etc. and 85% charge at the end of day one.
It's just business. If a business gave you the best technology they had in their lab at the lowest price, they'd be out of business much more quickly. Instead of selling you a single 3TB SSD now for $300, they'll sell something like 512GB for $300 and leave people to supplement it with expensive SSDs or a slower 3TB HDD setup. If people go with HDD, there will be a demand for upgrades to the SSD for another 3-5 years. It would go something like:
Option 1: 3TB SSD for $300, keep it for 5 years.
Option 2: 512GB SSD for $300 in 2014 + 3rd party 3TB HDD, in 3 years get a 1.5TB SSD for $300 + 3TB HDD, in 5 years get 3TB SSD for $300 and maybe an external 3TB SSD for backup.
They could make 3-4x the revenue in a 5 year timeframe. For a business, 5 years isn't a long time. That's not to say they deliberately hold everything back, technology manufacturing also has to be ramped up. You invest billions in R&D and a manufacturing process and then bring it to market to grow capital and repeat the cycle improving the manufacturing each time.
SSDs have been dropping 25% in price roughly every year so far. Samsung switched to 3D NAND, which is intended to lower prices. That's in the 850 EVO. I expect it to reach $0.10/GB by 2020, which means laptops would be able to get 3TB internally for $300.
Now sure 4K content comes along so video editing will need around 1Gbit/s i.e 450GB per hour of footage but HDDs aren't fast enough so that further drives sales of SSD drives. I think once SSDs hit $0.10/GB, it will be game over for HDDs, maybe even $0.20/GB. Mechanical parts are too unreliable to put 8TB on a single point of failure. One knock the wrong way and it's all gone, needing a full day to make another copy from a backup.
SSDs only really started coming to consumers around 2007:
32GB for $600-1400. You can now get 1TB for about 2/3 that entry price so that's an improvement of about 45x in 7-8 years. That's not too bad.
The great thing with SSD is the size doesn't need to get bigger. They'll keep shrinking the process so 3TB will fit into the blades you get in the laptops. I think they can scale up to something like 10-20TB before they hit the limits.
Comments
Make sure you have energy saver sleep set to never. USB is slower than TB but should be enough for HDDs.
They have it on the Mac Pro order page for $800. They don't have an aftermarket upgrade but if you enquired about it, a store might be willing to do it for you. They should offer an aftermarket service on their website or even just the bare drive for Mac Pro owners as it can be installed easily. It might cost a bit extra as they would either be taking your old used SSD vs an unused one at the time of ordering or not taking your old storage back.
Thanks for the reply
No sleep: Yep I did that and i also tried a never sleep utility that had a user time setting to keep awake. They still would power off at random.
Speed: It was far more issues than test speed. Benchmark tests showed them to fast enough for sure but in a real world test with FCPro X using HD they were nowhere near performing as advertised, 4K forget it. The exact same drives on the TB dock can chew through 4K video like a knife through butter. I began to wonder if a) the nMP has a USB3 issue or b) USB3 is not good at certain things such as video editing. I have zero experience of USB other than the usual suspects, as I always used FireWire in the past for real work.
Re Apple SSDs: Ah, I thought people were seeing an aftermarket product from Apple as I kept reading reviews saying OWC's 1TB were more than 'Apple's'. I guess it is not really fair to judge OWC's price by comparing with a BTO part, not that I have every checked to see if that's the norm that Apple price BTO parts better than after sales of same product boxed, but I would expect Apple would jack the price up on a stand alone product. As an asside It would be nice if there were a trade in for the existing SSDs in such purchase, whoever they were from, given there is no docking ability unless some one comes up with an adapter.
Anandtech found that they designed the USB 3 ports to run over a single PCIe 2 lane:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7603/mac-pro-review-late-2013/8
"A single PCIe 2.0 lane offers a maximum of 500MB/s of bandwidth in either direction (1GB/s aggregate), which is enough for the real world max transfer rates over USB 3.0. Do keep this limitation in mind if you’re thinking about populating all four USB 3.0 ports with high-speed storage with the intent of building a low-cost Thunderbolt alternative. You’ll be bound by the performance of a single PCIe 2.0 lane."
The Thunderbolt ports get more bandwidth allocated to them. USB 3 does perform more slowly than Thunderbolt though as shown here:
http://www.macworld.com/article/2039427/how-fast-is-usb-3-0-really-.html
Apple gets the advantage at the BTO stage by including the base storage in the price so when they charge $800 for 1TB, it's really $800 for 768GB as they are keeping the base 256GB you paid for. That's why it's harder for 3rd parties compete with them for the mainstream storage and RAM upgrades. It's only when you get to the much higher upgrades like 32GB RAM or 2TB SSD that deducting the base size prices doesn't negate how much cheaper they are.
I don't know why Apple doesn't have a service for the SSD like they do for batteries. Some people will have bought too small a storage and just want a bigger one. Maybe there's not enough demand for it to be worthwhile.
I don’t care about external drives. I care about LARGER drives and cheaper SSDs.
There’s now a 6TB from WD, apparently, but the biggest SSDs can’t even match that. Have prices even been going down in the last few years?
Quite.
Why is storage capacity so slow to increase? Ditto storage in iOS devices? We had 160GB in the iPod classic years and years ago. We should be at 1TB by now. And in SSDs, why do they still trail traditional hard disks so badly? We should be at affordable 3TB SSDs in iMacs by now.
It’s all so slow. Ditto battery life. Storage and battery life are the two big laggards of technology. I want an iPad with 3TB. I want an iPhone with 1TB and a week's battery life, regardless of what I throw at it. Personal hotspot on the whole time, every single app with background updating, intense games, bluetooth on, LTE on, etc. and 85% charge at the end of day one.
It's just business. If a business gave you the best technology they had in their lab at the lowest price, they'd be out of business much more quickly. Instead of selling you a single 3TB SSD now for $300, they'll sell something like 512GB for $300 and leave people to supplement it with expensive SSDs or a slower 3TB HDD setup. If people go with HDD, there will be a demand for upgrades to the SSD for another 3-5 years. It would go something like:
Option 1: 3TB SSD for $300, keep it for 5 years.
Option 2: 512GB SSD for $300 in 2014 + 3rd party 3TB HDD, in 3 years get a 1.5TB SSD for $300 + 3TB HDD, in 5 years get 3TB SSD for $300 and maybe an external 3TB SSD for backup.
They could make 3-4x the revenue in a 5 year timeframe. For a business, 5 years isn't a long time. That's not to say they deliberately hold everything back, technology manufacturing also has to be ramped up. You invest billions in R&D and a manufacturing process and then bring it to market to grow capital and repeat the cycle improving the manufacturing each time.
SSDs have been dropping 25% in price roughly every year so far. Samsung switched to 3D NAND, which is intended to lower prices. That's in the 850 EVO. I expect it to reach $0.10/GB by 2020, which means laptops would be able to get 3TB internally for $300.
Now sure 4K content comes along so video editing will need around 1Gbit/s i.e 450GB per hour of footage but HDDs aren't fast enough so that further drives sales of SSD drives. I think once SSDs hit $0.10/GB, it will be game over for HDDs, maybe even $0.20/GB. Mechanical parts are too unreliable to put 8TB on a single point of failure. One knock the wrong way and it's all gone, needing a full day to make another copy from a backup.
SSDs only really started coming to consumers around 2007:
http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/04/sandisk-announces-32gb-ssd-prices-begin-to-fall/
32GB for $600-1400. You can now get 1TB for about 2/3 that entry price so that's an improvement of about 45x in 7-8 years. That's not too bad.
The great thing with SSD is the size doesn't need to get bigger. They'll keep shrinking the process so 3TB will fit into the blades you get in the laptops. I think they can scale up to something like 10-20TB before they hit the limits.