If you weren’t convinced that the most dramatic upgrade you can do to a Mac is install a solid state drive in its belly, check this video out.
15 seconds. Just 15 seconds. That’s how long it takes a 3.4GHz Sandy Bridge iMac armed with a Sandy Bridge processor and an SSD drive to launch all of its apps simultaneously.
Apple’s latest lineup of MacBook Airs are incredible, and since their launch they’ve been lavished with attention from just about everyone – from the tech world’s greatest reviewers to the hooded youths that gather around them in the Apple Store. But a recent refresh to the MacBook Pro family is beginning to steal their limelight – boasting features like Sandy Bridge processors and Thunderbolt ports – and the Airs want it back with their share of new components. They may only have to wait a little while longer, however, as one report suggests a refresh within the coming months.
Expect as much as twice as much storage to be stuffed into 2012’s MacBook Airs. Industry market research firm Gartner says that the price of solid state drives will drop below a buck per gigabyte by the second half of 2012.
When I first got my Macbook Air, I fell in love with its diminutive profile, speedy boot times and incredible portability, but after living with it for a few months, one thing became glaringly apparent – 128GB was simply not enough room. Having convinced myself it would be at the time or purchase – I have recently found myself umbilically attached to a 500GB USB hard drive for music and photos.
Now, 6 months in, I was faced with two choices – stick the current MBA on eBay and stump up the extra cash for a larger capacity Air – or invest in a 3rd party storage solution. The first option is just stupid, so an upgrade was on the cards.
OCZ has just announced its Agility 3 and Solid 3 series of 2.5-inch solid-state drives aimed at users dying to get their hands on a super-speedy SSD, but with a tight budget to contend with.
Other World Computing has just announced its latest Mercury Aura Pro Express solid-state drive designed for the latest generation of MacBook Airs. Boasting a whopping 480GB of storage, the upgrade offers nearly 4x more capacity than currently available from factory available SSDs, and is an incredible 68% faster.
As you’d expect from an SSD, however, especially one designed for the latest MacBook Air, these babies come at one heck of a price. The 480GB upgrade will set you back a staggering $1,579.99, but you’re not going to find this kind of storage for Apple’s ultra portable notebook anywhere else.
Apple’s new family of iMac all-in-ones released earlier this week boast an Intel BD82Z68 platform controller hub that isn’t scheduled for release until May 11th. The Z68 chip, designed for Sandy Bridge 1155, was first discovered by TonyMacx86 and later confirmed in an iFixit teardown.
The Z68 allows for solid-state drive data caching when a system is equipped with a combination of storage drives. So users could install a small, relatively cheap SSD along with their traditional hard disk drive and have the SSD serve as a cache – dramatically increasing access speeds to their files and applications. The new iMacs can be ordered with both an SSD and a traditional hard disk drive installed, and the Z68 can allow users to see this combination as just one drive on their Mac.
Apple’s new family of iMacs launched today, featuring Intel’s latest Core i5 and i7 processors, 4GB of RAM, and 3x faster graphics; all the ingredients needed to bake a super speedy all-in-one. However, there’s one thing missing from Apple’s lineup of four ‘ready-made’ iMacs, and that’s a solid-state drive. Without one your shiny new iMac might not be as fast as you expected it to be.
Crucial has just launched its new M4 lineup of 2.5-inch solid-state drives, which are the successors to the RealSSD C300 range, and boast faster read and write speeds. The M4 uses 25nm technology NAND flash created by its parent company Micron, and is available in 64GB, 128GB, 256GB and 512GB models.
Crucial claim the new M4 SSDs reach read speeds of up to 415MBps – a 17% increase over its predecessor – while write speeds are up 20% with speeds of up to 260MBps.
As with all SSDs, however, this technology doesn’t come cheap. The 64GB M4 will cost you $130, which rises to $250 for the 128GB, $500 for the 256GB and $1000 for the 512GB. All can be purchased directly from Crucial and include a three-year warranty.
While the M4s are pretty pricey, solid-state drives are a great way of improving the speed of your Mac. Traditional hard drives are famous for being the bottleneck in modern-day Macs, and since the release of the incredibly nippy second-generation MacBook Air, many users have realized the difference an SSD can make and have adopted the new technology. Recent tests have proven that MacBook Pros equipped with SSD drives are significantly faster than those with traditional HDDs.
[via Macworld]
Samsung could be about to sell its dwindling hard disk drive business as flash memory becomes increasingly popular, according to a person “familiar with the matter.” Thanks to the success of devices such as the iPod, iPad and MacBook Air, Apple has boosted the adoption of flash memory devices and encouraged consumers to ditch standard hard drives for speedier storage.
Samsung has set a target price of $1.5 billion for its hard drive business, but the Korean company is reportedly keen to sell it for under $1 billion if the right customer comes along. The Wall Street Journal report notes that Seagate Technologies could be a candidate for the business, though neither company has commented on the rumor.
Apple is considered to be the largest consumer of flash memory in the world, and predominantly responsible for the shift away from conventional hard drives to solid state drives. It’s believed the company’s iPad is entirely responsible for the complete reorganization at Acer – whose netbooks sales were hit hard by the popular tablet.
Apple is undoubtedly responsible for my personal adoption of SSD drives; after purchasing an 11-inch MacBook Air my other Macs felt incredibly slow in comparison. It seems once you go flash, there’s no going back.
[via Electronista]
AnandTech is reporting that Apple has appeared to have made some changes to the MacBook Air released in October 2010. The Macbook Air refresh last fall included some welcome surprises for Apple fans — a new 11.6″ form factor, an external case redesign, faster graphics, and larger SSD drives. All of this came at a lower price. The most interesting part of the refresh was the new SSD drives. Apple didn’t use regular 2.5″ or 1.8″ SSDs and instead introduced a whole new type of SSD form factor called mSATA SSDs a.k.a. blade SSDs.
The new MacBook Airs are locked down tight, with our good friends over at iFixIt describing it as perhaps Apple’s least user-serviceable notebook yet. How locked down is it? Even the RAM is soldered to the motherboard. In fact, once you actually break open the MacBook Air, about the only thing that is remotely user replaceable is actually the Toshiba SSD drives installed inside.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that companies are already hawking replacement SSDs for the MacBook Air. The company in question is Photofast, based in Taiwan, and they’re now promising imminent delivery of a 256GB SSD memory module which will double the maximum memory capacity of your Air.
Price and release dates are still unknown, unfortunately, but according to Photofast, the upgrade will be fast and stable, and will actually give your new Air a 30% performance boost in read or write speeds of Apple’s advertised 160MB/s speeds. Apple’s conservative in their estimates, so it’s probably not that big of a boost, but considering the SSD drive in the Air is mostly responsible for the slender notebook’s excellent performance (despite relatively puny processors), even a slight bump in SSD performance is likely to be noticeable.
