SSDs - page 6

Mac and iOS users are strangers to NAND flash storage. After all, Apple has been using flash as a storage medium for years now. iPods, iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, and some MacBooks all rely on NAND flash as a storage medium of choice. The success of those products has led Apple to be world’s biggest buyer of NAND chips and was no doubt a factor to mention the company’s purchase of Israeli flash memory firm Anobit.

Solid state storage based on NAND flash isn’t Apple-specific. Plenty of other companies offer flash storage in an array of form factors for a huge variety of uses including smartphones and mobile devices. Solid state drives (SSD) drives are available as options for a range of PCs. They’re also becoming common options for servers and network devices. For businesses looking to implement Lion or Mountain Lion, SSDs can be an attractive option. They can also be an expensive prospect, and there may be better ways to spend your business dollars.

It’s been just three weeks since Apple issued refreshes to its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, and already they’re on sale at Best Buy, with up to $140 off the MSRP. That means you can pick up the base model MacBook Pro with Retina display — with a 2.3GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD — for $2,089.

If you’re planning to upgrade the flash storage in your 2010 or 2011 MacBook Air, don’t just discard your old module or let it go for pennies on eBay. With the Aurora Envoy enclosure from Other World Computing, you can turn that old flash storage into an external drive that’s designed to match your MacBook Air perfectly.

Amazing: I just liberated 10GB of space on my MacBook Pro’s harddrive that was being held prisoner by backups of iDevices I used to own, but had long since gone. And frankly, I’m not sure I would have found and freed up the space without the $10 DaisyDisk app.

SSDs are great! They make your computer run as if they were filled with greased lightning. That spinning beach ball stops spinning quite so much, and those apps struggling to load quit doing so much bouncing. Your computer gains instant-on functionality, better battery life, and ridiculously quick boot times. Win-win!

There’s only one problems: SSDs (like those found in the Retina MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPhone or iPad) don’t have the same high capacity as physical spinning drives. That’s a problem if you’re the kind of user who carries around a terrabyte of media with him at all times. Luckily, it looks like SSDs limitations when it comes to capacity sizes is about to change.

Forget RAM, forget a faster CPU, forget a beefier graphics card. If you are still running a Mac with a spinning, physical hard drive, the best upgrade you can possibly make is to drop a solid-state flash drive into the machine. The immediate effect on perceived performance is stunning: it’s the difference between seeing a spinning beach ball every hour and not seeing one for months at a time.

Unfortunately, for a long time, what has kept most people from making this update to their older Macs has been price. SSDs are more expensive than physical HDDs. That’s still true, by the way, but it’s less so now than it ever has been, making this a perfect time to finally take the plunge.

The MacBook Air has never been a slouch in terms of performance, but with the 2012 model, SSD performance is scoring a whopping 217% higher than ever before.

In tests run by OSXDaily, read speeds reached a maximum of 461MB/s, and write speeds hit 364MB/s, a dramatic increase over the 2011 model, which scored just a modest 145MB/s read speed and a 152MB/s write speed.

Apple really wants you to buy into their beautiful Retina display future. So much so, that if customers want to buy an old style MacBook Pro with the same specs as the new MacBook Pro with Retina display, they’re going to have to pay an extra $300 to get it. That extra $300 comes with an optical drive, one extra pound of aluminum, and a lower resolution screen, just so the fatty MacBook Pro can keep up with its slimmer sister everyone’s drooling over, but hey, at least you’ll still have an Ethernet port.

iFixit has described Apple’s new MacBook Pro as the “least repairable laptop” it has ever opened up, and subsequently gave the device a repair score of 1/10. However, just like the MacBook Air, you’ll be pleased to know that it is possible to upgrade the new MacBook Pro’s solid-state storage yourself.

Before the vast majority of us have even had the pleasure of signing for our new MacBook Pro delivery, iFixit has torn the notebook apart to reveal its internals. Although this is undoubtedly Apple’s best portable yet — what with its stunning Retina display, super speedy solid-state storage, and Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors — iFixit describes it as “the least repairable laptop” they’ve ever taken apart.

“Apple has packed all the things we have into one beautiful little package.” For consumers, this means incredible expensive repair bills, and little to no upgradeability at all.

Following those specifications for the new Mac Pro and the new MacBook Pro that we reported on earlier, the specifics for the Retina display MacBook Pro and the new MacBook Airs have now also been leaked. In addition to Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors for all models, highlights include up to 8GB of RAM and up to 512GB of SSD storage for the MacBook Air, and up to 768GB of storage for the MacBook Pro.

When Apple introduced the MacBook Air without an optical drive, everyone freaked out. “How on earth will we be able to watch all of our DVDs and listen to our CDs?” cried the internet. And sure, totally disowning physical media with a disk drive-less laptop may have been a little preemptive of Apple back in 2008, but the times have changed since then. We live in a world of digital media and digital software distribution. The success of services like Netflix and the Mac App Store proves that.

With rumors saying that Apple will introduce new and improved Macs in the coming weeks, what can we expect? Faster processors? Solid-state hard drives? Retina displays? While these features certainly seem to be on the table, there’s also the chance that Apple’s next-gen MacBook Pro will sport significant physical changes. Namely, we could finally see the optical drive retire from the MacBook line once and for all.

Apple apparently already has slimmed-down 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pros in production. The redesigned cases drop the optical drive, but storage will still be plentiful and CPUs will be more powerful than those in the current MacBook Air lineup, say the rumors.

The MacBook Airs are wonderful machines, let down only by the still-small storage offered by today’s SSDs. Worse, whilst external Thunderbolt drives are finally trickling into stores, they’re neither cheap nor plentiful.

Alas, Elgato’s rather awesome-looking Thunderbolt SSD drive combines the worst of both worlds — a high price and low capacity. Then again, I imagine this things is fast enough to burn a hole in your desk.

Take apart one of Apple’s latest iMacs and inside you’ll find plenty of space for mounting an additional hard drive. Of course, it’s useless if you don’t have the tools for the job, but that’s where iFixit comes in. The teardown specialists have released a new kit that provides you with everything you need for installing an additional hard drive in your new iMac.

The behemoth Consumer Electronics Show is upon us. By tomorrow, press-only showcases will already begin revealing this coming year’s tech magic (the show floor opens for everyone else on Tuesday).

We’ve been drawing aside the curtain as much as we were able in the form of previews throughout this past week. For those who missed them — and for the rest who want a quick recap as we plunge into the show — here’re the big highlights going in.

For years we’ve heard a lot of hype about SSDs and how they’re going to change computing, but their progress has been slow, and the masses have been getting impatient. Well CES 2012 will be the start of SSDs officially entering into mainstream use thanks to Apple Inc. The best purchase I made in 2011 was when I replaced my MacBook Pro with the new 11″ MacBook Air. Not only is the MacBook Air lighter than any laptop I’ve owned, it’s also powerful enough to do some really awesome things I’d never thought possible on a miniature computer (like playing graphic intensive games like Star Wars the Old Republic). Most of these technological marvels are all thanks to Apple’s inclusion on SSDs in the MacBook Air lineup. Of course, Apple didn’t invent the SSD, nor were they the first company to use them, but they’re responsible for bringing SSDs to the masses at an affordable price.

Apple is relatively unscathed by the recent Thailand flooding which threw for a loop PC makers more dependent on hard drives. That’s the word from Wall Street analysts who say Apple’s move to flash memory saved the Cupertino, Calif tech giant from the fate of Intel.

A new Apple patent that details battery and solid state drive configurations for the company’s MacBook Air suggests that future models will boast battery life that significantly exceeds the 7 hours offered by today’s ultraportable.

Apple’s recent firmware updates were famous for preparing the company’s latest Thunderbolt-equipped Macs for the upcoming Thunderbolt Display. However, they also enabled one feature than Apple didn’t tell you: SATA 6Gbps support.

Samsung has just announced the successor to its PM810 solid-state drive which is a super-speedy 6Gbps SATA 3 that boasts read speeds of up to 500MB/s and write speeds of up to 350MB/s. A custom version of the PM810 is currently used in Apple’s MacBook Air line lineup, so there’s a good possibility its impressive successor — the PM830 — will also hit the ultraportables.

Apple’s latest line of Mac mini compact desktops offer some pretty impressive specifications. What with those latest Intel Core i5 and i7 processors and the opportunity to grab a solid-state drive with a custom build, you can get a super speedy mini if you have the money.

One thing you can’t get for your new machine, no matter have much money you have, is 16GB of RAM… at least not from Apple.

If you haven’t already, stop reading this and check out Buster’s awesome review of the new MacBook Air. The machine is absolutely gorgeous. And powerful, too.

One of the MacBook Air’s main draws is its lightning-fast solid-state hardrive. An SSD outperforms traditional hardrives because all storage and data transfers happen virtually, instead of having to travel across a physical platter.

Apparently, Apple is shipping some of these brand new MacBook Airs with the same SSDs from older notebook models.

Apple’s new Mac mini has been available for two days now, and so it’s time for the company’s smallest desktop to get the iFixit teardown treatment. Though little has changed inside its svelte aluminum shell, Apple’s decision to remove the optical drive means there’s plenty of room for to double your storage… or even speed up your Mac mini dramatically.

The boys over at iFixIt have started their teardown of the 2011 13-inch MacBook Air, and while much of the construction is similar to last year’s models, there is some good news for DIY upgraders: contrary to rumors, the SSDs have not been soldered to the board, meaning that you can upgrade your Air’s storage down the line.

Otherwise, iFixIt doesn’t have much to report this time around, except for an explanation of the omission of a FaceTime HD webcam in the Air: the thinness of the display makes it pretty much impossible to put a beefier camera in there at this time. Good to know.