Any way to find out what "solid state drive" they've got? Is it Intel's X2? That'd make a big difference in how much I'd want to spend/how much time I'd want to spend installing my own.
But can you do this with the unibody MBPs? The battery's not user replaceable, right? What about the HD and RAM?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1262310
How to find out what kind of SSD is in an MBP:
Worst disks ever.
I can't speak for the newer, non-user-replaceable-battery models, but I can't imagine they made it harder to replace the HDD.
Start imagining. You need a mini-torx screwdriver to get the hdd out, once you get the cover off (8 phillips screws).
Not the end of the world, but not too many people have a T8 sitting around. I didn't.
In other words, it's still orders of magnitude better than replacing the HD in, say, an iBook.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM
Just had to look that up myself. Shocking that OS X doesn't support it natively, although the article suggests there may be utilities that can replace that functionality.
So maybe this is more of a theoretical problem than a practical one?
After eight months of heavy daily use, in which I'm quite certain I've achieved more than 256GB of total writes, I've seen... no change in performance. Still zippy and happy and writing just fine.
Time for misguided hype based on anandtech's articles to go away now.
(The divide might not be at the capacity of the disk; this was a 16GiB SSD with probably 20x that in writes.)
If you're only using a small fraction of the total capacity, chances are you won't see much performance degradation for a long while no matter how much you write to the drive because of minimal fragmentation at the block level. But given enough time, you'd still hit that wall at some point.
But if you're using a large fraction of the total capacity, then you're going to have much more fragmentation, which means pages that can't be erased without having to rewrite significant numbers of blocks in those pages. Those ephemeral writes will start taking a real performance hit.
Many newer SSDs now include logic in their controllers to help mitigate this problem, with varying degrees of success. But full TRIM support on the drive and in the OS make a significantly larger difference than anything done by the drive alone. (Even with TRIM, though, the problem doesn't go away completely.)
And this isn't just some kind of spin from Anandtech--TRIM exists for a reason. It's a well-tested property of MLC SSDs. The combination of wear leveling and write combining can cause serious performance issues without TRIM. This article describes it pretty well: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=669&type=expert&...
At any given moment I'm using about half the total capacity. I'm not regularly doing huge writes, but as someone who works with a ton of remote and local repositories, pulling/merging/etc. many times a day, I do end up doing a huge number of small writes nearly continuously; I'd be surprised if I haven't hit every bit of that drive at least once by now. And I haven't seen any dramatic, or even noticeable, degradation.
And this isn't just some kind of spin from Anandtech
It's more that a bunch of people skimmed the anandtech articles, then started spouting a lot of gratuitous "X25-M is the One True SSD, everything else is shit" hype, which later morphed into "never use an SSD in an OS that doesn't do TRIM" hype. Of course, the hype doesn't quite match the reality...
And no, SSDs aren't worthless without TRIM. But if you're likely to use the majority of the storage space on the drive and do a lot of writes besides, it could be the difference between "fast" and "really damn fast." Either way it'll still beat the pants off most rotational disk drives.
I think the takeaway, though, is that if you've spent potentially-obscene amounts of money on an SSD, wouldn't you prefer that your OS take full advantage of its capabilities to consistently deliver top performance?
(And no, that's not a dig at OS X. I'd recommend that Windows XP users upgrade to Win7 if they're considering upgrading to an SSD simply for the TRIM support. It can make that much of a difference depending on the user.)
I am using the first generation Intel SSD which doesn’t actually support such reorganization and isn’t noticeable affected by “being full” (as opposed to writing to the factory default empty state).
I am also using Crucial SSD (with OS X) and that as well is magnitudes faster than my previous mechanical disk.
So all in all, this degraded performance is blown a bit out of proportion and you are doing yourself a great disservice by holding out for TRIM support — to echo others: SSD was the best upgrade I added to my system.
Edit: I am btw using SSDs with a desktop system. So I compare them with my previous 7200 RPM drives. For a laptop there is absolutely no doubt that you should go with an SSD (if you can afford it), TRIM support or not. For a desktop, I would still highly recommend it.
This is incorrect; at least with the MBPs they were shipping until today it was a bit of a toss-up as to whether you'd get a Samsung or Toshiba SSD, and the only way to know what you got is to boot up the system and look at the drive's model number in System Profiler.
FWIW, the one that came in my MBP is Toshiba, and is still awfully zippy after eight months of heavy use (during which I'm quite certain I've written enough to the drive to start noticing any real degradation).
In advance, no, they don't tell you.
However, up until now every SSD Apple has shipped has been either Samsung or Toshiba, and you can find out which it is by opening OS X's System Profiler. Look under "Serial ATA" and you'll see the drive's description, which will be in the format "APPLE SSD (manufacturer code)(capacity)".
Toshiba drives will have a manufacturer code of "TS" (so my 256GB Toshiba SSD shows up as "APPLE SSD TS256A", for example). Samsung drives will have "SM". When I was shopping around last year trying to find out about this, it seemed that most of the 128GB drives were Samsung, most of the 256GB drives were Toshiba. What they're using for the 512GB drives is anybody's guess, but System Profiler will be the way to find out.
The money is roughly the half, and as a bonus you also get to keep the drive that came with the computer and use that as backup or additional, external storage, or even sell it to someone to get a few bucks back.
A simple rule of thumb for the Apple customer - NEVER get upgrades along with the order. It's just a waste of your money. You really don't have to be much of a "DIY" to replace memory or storage in a MacBook - they are all much, much more user friendly than your average HP/Dell/Whatever laptop.