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Speed thrills

Avatar Gordon Clyne
http://www.cultofmac.com/the-fastest-mac-can-launch-all-of-its-apps-simultaneously-in-just-15-seconds-video/101317#more-101317

Now I've seen some pretty fast demos on static drives at SanDisk in my day, but this is ridiculously fast. I put it down to the new intel core technology, and I presume some 56 or less memory hardware running a little hot, but it really shows the huge gap between rotational and static, just a shame the static has the same life expectancy as Roy in Bladerunner.... Limited!

Re: Speed thrills

Avatar Derek Wright
Why has a SSD a shorter life expectancy than a rotating drive, - no moving parts, no temperature sensitive lubrication issues.

I questioned the supplier of my SSD and they said that the life would exceed that of a conventional drive.

Re: Speed thrills

Avatar Gordon Clyne
The smaller the NAND cell size the faster it wears. At 32 Nanometers we are really seeing quantum effects happening, and the memory can leak and die, or bits can corrupt and become unreliable. It's made smaller to satisfy demand, but the lifespan is shorter. Nobody makes 140 nanometer memory any more but that was bulletproof and lasts forever. At today's 56 and 32 NM feature sizes I would expect no more than about 10-30 thousand completed write/erase cycles for the whole memory before it begins to degrade. And memory is temperature sensitive too. Who supplied your ssd and did they give you operating specs? I would doubt it, because every supplier in the memory biz doesn't part with that data easily. I worked at SanDisk as the custom memory guy, so I do know what I'm talking about!!! . Your drive is either samsung, Toshiba/SanDisk, or hynix, supertalent, renesas, or another minor memory maker, but these are the last few silicon fabricators left in the market. It may well have a different brand, but the guts are for sure one of the above.

Re: Speed thrills

Avatar Euan Williams
Gordon, this is frighteningly serious technical stuff for many of our gentle page turners.

What, if anything, cured your Calendar Synch issue (June 16th post)? Could it be a rogue 32nm NAND cell on your SSD?

"Shock Horror" headlines:
Investment strategies hang in the balance: quantum uncertainty? Is it antimatter pollution or microscopic black holes in the LHD at Cern? The revenge of Schroedinger’s infamously treated cat? Could the Norwegians inadvertently set off random quantum road tunnelling? What is it with ‘fracking’? What to do when quantum spin stops spinning? Sir Tim Berners-Lee not seen in Southampton: what is he inventing?

--Enjoy! (But what is it with your iCal synch?)

Re: Speed thrills

Avatar Derek Wright
I bought one of these.
Details of OWC SSD product

Basically you are saying that SSD is a dead end as opposed to the way storage will go, and the Mac Book Air is a limited life fashion accessory. (Perhaps all Macs laptops are fashion accessories).

Typically if a product is over ambitious in in its aims (in this case decreasing cell size in memory used in SSDs) then the target product will push back the cell size to a reliable size until the technology will support such small cell sizes.

Re: Speed thrills

Avatar Gordon Clyne
no...... I'm saying that memory wears out. the controllers are smart enough to "spare out" or hide a group of defective cells if they believe the readability of them is going to become compromised. Memory controllers are wondrous things, complete computers in themselves, testing the memory for flakiness whilst also performing read writes at the same time, however if you have an intensive IO application it will wear the memory faster. this is why NAND is never used for main memory storage in a UNIX machine because of all the paging of memory all the time. I do however believe that the speed benefits are HUGE, but the price is still prohibitive, but its dropping like a stone. One of the drivers is silicon production has rocketed with the need for solar cells, so supply is up and prices dropping as a result.

At 140 nanometer, you can read and write it bazillions of times, at 30, probably 10-50 thousand or so, but thats still a lot of read writes to every cell, and the way the controllers work, they write the whole memory once before rewriting the same cell again. reads do NOT degrade the performance.

cell size will decrease but the reliability will improves (better boundary condition checking in the controllers.) and smaller is faster, so there are tradeoffs, speed, reliability, price. a b#tch of a venn diagram!!

Re: Speed thrills

Avatar Euan Williams
and... Cnet have an article today about swapping the optical drive in a MacBook Pro for an SSD here.

Re: Speed thrills

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Don't worry Euan! Peel back the veneer of any piece of modern electronics and you will find a world of terrifying compromises as engineers strive to coax a host of improbable devices, sometimes operating dangerously close to the chaos of quantum physics, to perform in a way that looks reasonably rational and predictable to us nervous users.

Or look at it another way: As long as the SSD outlasts the non-replaceable battery in the MacBook Air, it's arguably not an issue.

Re: Speed thrills

Avatar Mick Burrell
Having read Euan's comment above - "Gordon, this is frighteningly serious technical stuff for many of our gentle page turners." I hit on the idea of using Google translate to get a version of this thread in English. Sadly, it doesn't work ;-)

Re: Speed thrills

Avatar Euan Williams
Mick, The Svalbard Weekly News (ok, but I’m really into this) with Google translation does make for some innovative English, occasionally lapsing into the original Norwegian -- but then these linguistic inadequacies are sadly a common human experience.

SlashGear posted an article today about LaCie’s Raid drives with two SSDs inside offering sparkling performance for video editing. Prices? Don’t ask, but they are a taste of more modest things to come later this summer if all goes well. Meanwhile the video should set Gordon humming with anticipation, at least until his battery runs out and the NAND cell yields eccentric data.

Now: time to check my two-hour clone on the 5,200 rpm drives. Perhaps it’s time to see if the cat survived too. ;-)

Re: Speed thrills

Avatar Alan Cox
Well . . . . . . . . yes . . . . . . . and perhaps no.
 
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