The Crucial/Micron M500 Review – 960GB SSD for $600 | Hacker News Reader

The Crucial/Micron M500 Review – 960GB SSD for $600

anandtech.com

88 pointsjseliger72 comments

I bet MBP Retina owners would love to upgrade their machines with this SSD.

Oh wait, they can't, because Apple came up with their own butchered SATA interface instead of using the standard one.

Why do you say butchered? I don't think it's any worse (or better) than standard mSATA. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The physical connector is different, so you can't plug in a standard mSATA drive.

"Keep in mind that although the interface is electrically SATA, it is not physically SATA or mSATA or any other standardized interface - this is entirely Apple's own creation."

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6005/apples-new-ssd-its-fast

Don't blame Apple too much for this.

mSATA's reused mini-PCIe card form factor was physically too small to contain all the chips needed for a high capacity SSD, given the capacities per chip that were available when the MacBook Air/Retina were released.

There is a new "NGFF" standard that basically apes Apple's longer form factor with a standardized connector, but I haven't seen any devices that use it yet:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6293/ngff-ssds-putting-an-end-...

In exchange for "butchering" the connector, the drive is significantly smaller. As an rMBP owner, I feel that that's a perfectly cromulent trade-off to make. Somebody has to be first; since Apple is invested in improving their hardware in ways unconstrained by the requirements of "bolt 'em together" OEMs, it makes perfect sense to me.

As long as people know, it's fine for Apple to use weird connectors.

Asus soldered the (tiny) SSD into the EEE PC and that's worse.

Incompatible with the rest of the world is a pretty good, if non-standard, definition of "worse" in my book.

I bet Chromebook Pixel and Surface Pro users would love it too...

Surface Pro has a standard mSATA interface in there if you don't mind tearing it apart. It won't take the part in the OP, but there are lots of them on newegg in sizes up to 480GB.

A fair point, although it seems that Microsoft has designed the Surface Pro in such a way that it is particularly difficult to take apart and put back together. iFixit gave it a repairability score of 1/10.

It seems similar--one manufacturer restricts modification by changing the connectors, the other by changing the casing.

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+Teardow...

Honestly, none of that looks particularly intended to make it difficult to disassemble. It looks like design choices intended to make it as compact and light as possible.

I bet the 98% of rMBP owners who will never upgrade their SSD appreciate the size reduction instead.

The Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook has a standard mSATA connector, while the larger Dell XPS 14 Ultrabook accepts 7mm SATA drives. Both laptops are smaller than the rMBP.

69Wh vs. 74 Wh and 95 W*h. There are tradeoffs to consider.

I forget: what does the P stand for again?

Also, you're off by 2%.

It stands for "Pro". That means it's used by professionals. You know - lawyers, doctors, salespeople, sportspeople, professors of ancient history. That sort of thing. Most are unlikely to need to upgrade the SSD.

is that meant as a serious reply?

Pro is a badge. Just like "Super Deluxe", "Extra Special", "Custom Ordered"..

We don't go around saying that a super deluxe cheeseburger is only for the super deluxe among us.

Well, it's sort of serious. A lot of people seem to think that "Professional" implies something about the target market that means the computer should be upgradeable/have a firewire port/use compact flash/sport a replaceable battery/etc. But it could actually imply exactly what the word suggests, and yet still mean none of this.

In actual fact, of course, it implies nothing, and that's why it means none of the above. "Pro" is just a badge, as meaningless as the "Sport" that adorns my car (4 doors, diesel engine).

Originally, Macs were defined in four quadrants: Desktop vs. Portable, and Consumer vs. Pro. Each meant something very specific, trying to meet the needs of the different computing markets at the time.

These days, though, the quadrants are gone, and the names are mostly just branding fluff.

Professionals also can (and do) get a ton of mileage out of the Air. I don't see why a distinct 15" Air model couldn't have targeted the same market.

Also, just because professionals aren't hardcore computer nerds doesn't mean they don't desire to upgrade. In particular, creative professionals (graphic artists, video editors, musicians) can always make use of more storage and performance, and in days past, many of these non-nerds would become savvy enough to upgrade whatever they could. Hell, even my parents know what memory is, and that more is better.

It's Apple's product line, they can do what they want. But as a result of their decision, many power users are clinging to the last-gen product line, because it's still upgradeable, and a truly "Pro" Mac laptop is no longer available for sale. (Technically, you can still buy the old form factor, but we all know which way the wind is blowing.)

What makes a "Pro" laptop?

Professionals also can (and do) get a ton of mileage out of the Air

That depends a bit on your use case. I have heard the Air described as an "executive" laptop, because it makes for particularly good mobility without sacrificing ability to do what an executive type would do- documents, email, powerpoint, etc.

Yes, 'pro' is in 'you need to get one of these if you want a screen big enough to get actual work done on'

Really? I've wound up doing a drive swap on every laptop, and almost every PC or server I've ever owned, sometimes more than once. I might have a higher propensity to do that than average, but surely drives are just behind batteries for "most replaced component"

You are the 2%! Congratulations!

I would wager that even so, drives are replaced in less than 10% of all laptops bought by consumers. Even batteries would likely be a small portion.

Now if we talk about this particular upgrade, how many people would pay $600 bucks for 960 GB of space, I can imagine it's an even smaller fraction.

The size benefit is something that everyone appreciates when they buy a MBP retina. There are enough other laptop choices if you want upgrade-ability and repair-ability, and MBP retina doesn't need to compete on that level.

Dunno about you, but I just use network storage. Cheaper, more appropriate for things that take a lot of space, and available to every computer on the network.

Same here, have done drive replacement in two out of the three macs i've owned because they broke down within three years after purchase.

Yes, but i don't appreciate that they literally made the macbooks too small. The entry-level macbook used to have a 13 inch screen, which i could work on, and now it has an 11 inch screen, which i can't work on. Their post-air line-up basically charges me double (or close enough) for the same form factor that i used to get entry-level. They priced themselves out of my budget, and i got an asus instead.

I think that most people aren't obsessed with smaller, lighter laptops, not since the tablet age. A laptop is something you use to sit down at a desk with, and whatever thinness advantage there is goes away then. Apple is losing laptop sales because their line-up doesn't cater to people's needs as well as it used to do.

Yes, Apple is very sinister & cunning, but I have devised a defense to even their most devilish hardware-standard-defying scheme:

1. Don't buy one.

I wanted to add an SSD in my DVD slot & upgrade the RAM, so I bought a Lenovo and put Ubuntu on it. I know it sounds crazy, but it just might be crazy enough to work.

Unfortunately if the 2880x1800 resolution is important to you, at this stage the MBP is the only option.

I agree though, you can't purchase a MacBook under the assumption that it'll be upgradable. I didn't buy one and I am quite happy with my 1080p 13" laptop until high resolution Windows laptops are available.

I was under the impression that the Chromebook Pixel has a slightly better screen than the rMBP?

http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-p...

edit: other commenters are saying the Chromebook Pixel doesn't have an upgradeable SSD at all.

I'm curious, as someone with a 512GB SSD, and only using about 20% of that, does anyone actually need this sort of capacity? The obvious answer is if you want to keep a lot of media on the drive but in that case the benefits over an HDD are insignificant, and in my opinion not worth the price premium. Maybe this is mainly for the enterprise space and servers?

While I agree that it seems a bit excessive, one valid potential use case would be people who need to keep a lot of VM's around. I don't personally have nearly enough to require that kind of space, but I can imagine some people might; for example, having a large set of Windows configurations for application or website testing.

I guess that makes sense. We can at least all agree that having options like this on the market is a good thing, as this will most likely also drive down prices on smaller capacity drives.

Yep, it'll be great to see the prices keep coming down. My main workstation has a 128GB SSD which is split between Linux (for work) and Windows (for Blizzard games); in this situation a 256GB would be a lot more comfortable.

I filled up my 240GB in a week with software alone (Shogun 2, for instance, takes up 25GB).

Shogun is a game, not software ;)

"Computer software, or just software, is any set of machine-readable instructions (most often in the form of a computer program) that directs a computer's processor to perform specific operations."[1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software

Joke detector not working today?

We at Hacker News do not have a sense of humor that we're aware of.

I'm laughing at that :)

Life pretty much sucks without some jokes and a little laughter.

We are not amused.

It's not that HN is anti humour. It's that by upvoting jokes and the like, you encourage everyone to toss in their oh-so-clever jokes and the level of discussion runs even further downhill. Reddit's there if you want that; HN _tries_ at least to avoid some of the bottom-level commenting.

Perhaps for individuals/companies in need of a ton of local storage for graphical rendering. This is going to be a godsend for the visual editing industry.

I'd love to have one of these in a 13" notebook to use as main system while doing extended travelling.

My steam account would sadly fill a 1TB ssd quickly. I also use them at work for a shared development Cassandra cluster which runs awesome but uses a lot of space (albeit we use 512GB drives)

Anyone who works with large datasets for machine learning, image processing, robotics, science data processing can use this capacity.

Video editing is probably a good target. When we do any kind of HD video editing you are looking at raw video upwards of the 60gb range just for one video. Especially if you are building out renders being able to access those on a local harddrive instead of over firewire/usb would be a godsend. With that said when you are using files that large, complex backup systems are necessary so internal ssd probably wont even meet that need.

Or plain video capture for pro / pro-consumer.

The local cable access station in Portland, Oregon[3] uses a mix of Aja Ki Pro [2] and Cinedecks[1]. The Cinedecks use SSDs like cartridges, and will record 1080p 4:4:4 ProRes.

The Cinedecks are real nice to be able to use a couple of 512GB SSDs like a cartridge and pop them in and out to record anything from a City Council / School Board meeting or for public use of recording a 3 camera shoot of a live performance.

The Ajas not so much since they use a proprietary shaped cartridge which has SATA connector to dock into the unit. They also have a FW800 connector to off-load data off the drive when undocked from the Aja recorders. I believe you can swap the drives in the plastic housing, but it's not as slick as just using a bare SSD.

[1] http://www.cinedeck.com/ [2] http://www.aja.com/en/products/ki-pro/#overview [3] http://www.pcmtv.org

It's probably mainly targeted towards servers but there's a healthy market for it among consumers. After all, there are a lot of people out there with specific needs or wants that call for storage - it may be a 'niche' product at the moment, but even now the niche is pretty big (even 1% of a ton of people is a ton of people).

My personal (developer machine) calls for around 400gb for VMs and databases. Useful install media (which, sure, is largely optional) adds another ~30gb. If I want a few games on the machine, that's an extra ~20gb. Already, that's around 450gb of space used, and that's being pretty space conscious.

Huge drives like this provide convenience. If I want to back things up locally (full VM snapshots, database backups), there's enough space to do that without having to worry / shuffle things off to a NAS (which may or may not be an option if it's a laptop and you're on the road), and HDDs don't cut it performance-wise.

I'm definitely a minority, but plan on building a durable array (for on and off-road travel). Until now, a redundant terabyte was pretty hard to swallow.

Now I'm just looking for a nice 2.5" enclosure with a built-in RAID controller and eSATA or USB 3.0.

I said the same thing about my 2TB iMac hard drive. Then we had a baby. All of the sudden, I have thousands of pictures and videos.

I would strongly consider putting this in a computer, only to make tasks like video editing faster. Using tablets all of the time makes my tolerance for poor performance very low ;)

>does anyone actually need this sort of capacity

Anyone using a laptop with a single drive and lots of photos or videos will. Photos and videos are the real drivers of most people's HD needs.

I have a 512GB SSD, a 128GB SSD, and a 128GB mSATA all in the same laptop - and I use all of them. With Steam, documents, code, VMs, and so on, I find a way to fill it up.

For most people storing media, a large (~3TB) spinner is ideal, paired with a 256GB or 512GB SSD. But for some people, especially in the content creation business, a 960GB SSD is quite alluring.

The benefits over a spinning disk are in no way insignificant. You might not see them, but they exist. I am at 80% utilization of a 512GB SSD in my rMBP, so any new capacity is welcome.

Scientific applications. Large data sets. Huge databases. Samples for musicians.

However, I think the most important reason for me is my huge collection of Steam games. Currently I have Steam installed on a HDD instead of my SSD, because my SSD is only 256GB and Steam is over 800GB. Heh. :P

Video editing.

This is, in a very real way, relevant to my interests, as someone who has just run out of space on his existing edit SSD.

I have a 128GB SSD, and it's constantly almost full. My photographs and music collection takes about 30GiB, WoW takes 30-40 GiB, my dev projects and school work about 7 GiB, OS and software takes 34 GiB (8GiB of that is reserved for future use), and rest 20 GiB is various miscellanous things that add up. I need 10 GiB free space to download and watch a movie, too.

And not only price is good

>In theory, Windows 8's BitLocker should leverage the M500's hardware encryption engine instead of using a software encryption layer on top of it.

I don't see how the built-in encryption is useful to anyone. It's not auditable: how do you know if your data actually gets encrypted?

That is not something I'd trust.

Are there no low-level commands to access the stored cyphertext?

AFAIK no. If the drive hasn't been unlocked with the proper keys it just refuses any reads/writes.

If that so, how could you boot from such drive?

You have to enter the hard drive password when you boot.

On my ThinkPads, I set the power-on password and the hard drive passwords all the same. Then I enter the power-on password and it feeds that password to all the hard drives too. (I have three SSDs in my W520.)

Hmm. I think ability to do the following would be nice: boot from Linux LiveCD, copy (dd) whole disk to another ssd/hdd (with no hardware encryption), plug in the second one into Windows 8 system, check the settings (AES/256), enter BitLocker password (or/and insert USB flash with keyfile etc.), get your data.

Presumably it either does or doesn't work. I can't imagine you could configure it wrong. Presumably somebody will probably put it to the test.

So, once somebody tests it out, you can be pretty confident it is working.

Hardly a good only line of defense for extremely sensitive data, but a nice addition to a long chain of defense for moderately sensitive data without a big performance penalty.

Are Marvell controllers any good?

My old Marvell SATA controllers were dogshit.

I have one at home right now. It is dogshit as well. Countless BSOD because of it.

I've been running an old Supermicro 8-port MV88SX6081-based card on FreeBSD+ZFS since about 2008 - never had a problem. Same controller was used by Sun in their venerable 48-drive X4500 "Thumper" servers, too.

Not sure that's entirely relevant information in this case though :P

It seems to be a bit of overkill. Does anyone know of a decent hybrid drive with 32+ GB of SSD storage and a reasonable HDD that look like 2 separate devices to the computer?

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