Engadget’s Ryan Block has transplanted a Samsung 64GB solid state drive into his Apple MacBook Pro and finds that a fresh install of Mac OS X Leopard booting with a number of extensions and startup items boots up in about 20 seconds:
This is really how everyone’s laptop experience should be: free from worries about platter scratches or head crashes from bumps or drops; silent, cool drive operation; super fast access to your data. It’s just an early taste of what portable computing will be like in a few years, and it’s amazing.
Blocks times his Samsung 64GB SSD-equipped MacBook Pro with an Apple iPhone:
Direct link via YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIUa0mwUwW8
Full article here.
Block’s review of Samsung’s 64GB SSD for Engadget here.
Yeah seriously, I’m getting the shakes. Where’s Apples money going? I was thinking of buying in at 200 (didn’t get that far) I realise it won’t bomb out to zero but… buy now while cheap? The only way is up, baby?
My C64 boots up instantly
My 17″ MacBook Pro (1st Gen, 100GB 7200rpm HD running Leopard) boots in 37 seconds. I will sacrifice 17s for the extra storage.
Yeah 20 seconds is quick, but my SE can boot up with System 7.5 with enough Extensions to fill up the entire 9″ screen. It may take five minutes, but all those Extensions loading row after row is really cool. I should have at least 256 MB of RAM left even with Ram Doubler installed from Conectix. LOL
Does anyone know how much space these 64gb drives take up? If they are small enough, couldn’t several of them be used together in a RAID to expand the amount of memory space solid state drive technology can give us.
Big hairy deal as someone use to say to me. Now what would be interesting is for someone who has jail-broken their Apple iPhone from a hardware standpoint and replaced the 8 GB’s with 64 GB’s. Anybody hear of such a thing? Please post a link.
I wasn’t as clear as I had intended to be. I want bits about anyone replacing the Flash Drive of their Apple iPhone with a 64 GM Flash Drive. Now if this person had installed and booted from a flash drive on the MacBook Pro, this would be interesting.
Well, he does say it’s a “first generation” MacBook Pro, but he doesn’t specify the OS X version. But if 20 seconds is the best he can do, and others are reporting their own systems doing almost as well, either the Samsung drive is not notably faster than a disk drive, or disk speed is not the critical element in bootup times.
Note that an iPhone, also running an optimized version of OS X on a flash drive, boots in seconds. So something else is going on here.
Let me offer one more theory: His flash disk drive is utilizing the same IDE bus used by the original drive. If *that* bus is the chokepoint, a flash disk drive will need a better pipeline into the system to result in a notable improvement.
~ 24 sec on my MBp 17″ at 7200rpm. And when he said 20 secs it was more like 22.
Who boots their Macs? I lift my Macbook’s lid and I’m ready to go in one second.
Oh ok, I run YASU about once a month. That and the occasional software update give me the rare restart.
Ryan Block is just an idiot. Please do not generate free hits for them by linking to them.
I think them main advantage to a solid state drive would be the additional battery life.
My MacBook Pro SUCKS with Leopard! It takes 39s to get to the desktop/menubar, and 1m 15s to get to where I can actually do something.
It was a lot faster with Tiger.
“Fast and Furious
I got a RAID 0 pair of 10,000 Raptors.
Should read “I got a RAID 0 pair of 10,000 RPM Raptors.””
I am smitten by the idea of a home computer that commands an army of vicious carnivores.
I dont know wtf you guys are talkin about…I dont even remember the last time I rebooted…
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Main question I have is what happens to the battery life with the SSD instead of the HD?
-jcr
“I’d say that we’ll see Macs with solid state drives before too long”
Correct, since they were introduced in the PC world about 6 months ago, it shouldn’t take Apple more than another year or two to get the same technology in a Mac.
Yea cause I want a 32GB ($413 newegg) of HD space.. I mean sure you can do 64GB ($2,014 newegg) but I mean who’d buy a $4000 Macbook Pro that starts up just a few seconds faster and has worse write speed?
My MBP ver 2.2 (2.33 Ghz, 2 GB RAM) loads up leopard in 34 sec from cold.
How is it with the rest of the crowd.
“I got a RAID 0 pair of 10,000 RPM Raptors.”
Not on a laptop you don’t. This is technology for portables, primarily.
I have a feeling if/when it offers a major advantage that outweighs the tradeoffs (who wants a laptop with a 64GB drive when they are all at least 120GB now?), Apple will include solid state drives in their laptops.
Remember, this company doesn’t do things just because they are technologically cool or geek-drool-inducing, or because they can. (Witness lack of high-def DVD drives on Macs so far) They carefully select their features based on what will contribute to the holistic user experience.
Will this SSD fit and work in my last generation 12″ G4 Powerbook?
I think this is a mis-guided demo. What it should really be demonstrating is not the speed of a boot up but all the benefits of solid state. Thinner, cooler, faster, less power, and green. The idea of capacity will be worked out in 6 months time. Maybe they install 2 – 64GB drives? I don’t think Apple would offer a lower drive product (laptop) to it’s customers. –
My two cents…It’s the future of laptop computing. Thank god – we can move out of the stone age.