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People are saying it being soldered down is a big disadvantage but I'm not following. The article says that M.2 spec will be available with PCIe or SATA interfa
by sambe 10y ago
People are saying it being soldered down is a big disadvantage but I'm not following. The article says that M.2 spec will be available with PCIe or SATA interfaces and there is a photo of a Toshiba version on what looks like a small PCIe card. Aren't these the same as buying an existing card-based SSD?
If not, what is the relationship between all these interface types? Are they intended to be soldered onto the motherboard?
- LeonM 10y agoIt mostly applies for laptops and other portable devices. Manufacturers may decide to solder the SSD directly to the motherboard, like Apple currently does with RAM on their laptop computers. This is beneficial to the manufacturer because it's more compact, less chance of mechanical failure, easier to assemble (pick&place instead of humans), lower price etc. In short: it's very attractive for manufacturers. For consumers this is worrying though, as with the RAM on Apple laptops: - You cannot replace a failed SSD, you need to replace the entire motherboard - You cannot upgrade the SSD, so you have to accept the ridiculous price stepup when ordering the laptop (i.e. the 200 dollar price bump to get 8GB extra RAM on a macbook pro) - Laptop is less valuable when trying to sell it on after a couple of years, because the storage size will be low compared to new SSD's.
- dexterdog 10y agoDoesn't Apple do it currently with their SSDs as well?
- LeonM 10y agoCould very well be, my MBP is from 2012 it still has a SSD module, don't know about the newer ones.
- dexterdog 10y agoI just looked it up on ifixit and my late 2013's SSD is removeable, but it's a proprietary device so it's astronomically priced.
- atonse 10y agoWhat's the most annoying about this is that, ok fine it's proprietary so you would expect Apple stores to be able to read from them. NOPE. The Apple Store just sends you to a data recovery company instead, because they can't read it. There's no better sign of bad customer service when you use a custom part but even you don't care to learn how to fix it.
- dsr_ 10y agoIt's not just a little less valuable two years later -- it's a lot less valuable, because the SSD lifetime is unknown and unreplaceable. This makes manufacturers happy, because more end-users will buy new devices rather than get a used one.
- wslh 10y ago> because the SSD lifetime is unknown and unreplaceable. I just discovered this concern last weekend when a less than 3 year old Samsung SSD 840 died. Since this is not mechanical I don't know why they don't include extra pins (e.g. address, data) to read the memory in raw from the SSD chips if the failure is in the controller or firmware.
- gavinward 10y agoPlace whatever value on this you like but I also had a Samsung 840 500GB SSD fail just last week that was almost exactly three years old. It came with a three year warranty so I guess that's the only upside. It's maddening that not only can I not get back whatever data wasn't backed up (thankfully not much) but I have no way of wiping it before returning it under warranty. The people who handle the returns for Samsung say returned drives will be "formatted". Given it's uunresponsive, this seems unlikely It puzzles me why drive manufacturers don't offer data recovery for their own products as a value add service. Nobody could get the data off this drive as cheaply as Samsung themselves.
- wslh 10y ago> It puzzles me why drive manufacturers don't offer data recovery for their own products as a value add service. Nobody could get the data off this drive as cheaply as Samsung themselves. Obviously we have our minds completely synchronized. At this point I don't care about the warranty but about the safety of the information in the disk. I contacted datarecovery.com and they gave me a rough range between $ 300 and 2k to recover the SSD. I don't think the price is crazy but I imagine that is a simple task to achieve if you have the right equipment.
- 10y ago
- janekm 10y agoThere's already a Flash upgrade service for iPhones available in China (similar kind of BGA chip). Which is kind of terrifying, the Flash on the iPhone has undersell so it has to be milled off on a CNC router, but apparently the process works quite reliably. Where there's a will, there is a way, and all that...
- jkot 10y agoThere was RAM upgrade service (from 8MB to 16MB) for Psion Revo 15 years ago. RAM was also soldered on board.
- BuildTheRobots 10y agoI don't remember if the Psion was BGA or not; I'm guessing not which makes soldering it substantially easier. In a similar vein, you could double the RAM on the original Xbox by soldering a second memory chip to the unpopulated pads on the underside of the board.
- agret 10y agoApple caught onto people getting storage upgrade for a reasonable price and made it so those phones will be bricked if you update them to the latest iOS. Scumbag Apple as usual :(
- ghshephard 10y agoAre you referring to the touch ID replacement, or storage upgrade?
- userbinator 10y agoOne major disadvantage that you can't easily remove the storage media for secure erase. Instead of removing the hard drive and destroying it, then selling/giving away the rest of the PC, companies would probably opt for destroying the entire PC. If the controller fails, with existing "discrete" SSDs you can still desolder the flash chips directly, put them in a reader, and recover the data that way (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8133450 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8133450 ) With this integrated "SSD", it could be nearly impossible to read the raw flash, meaning no more data recovery beyond the logical level. It's basically like an SD card. less chance of mechanical failure The widespread problem with RoHS lead-free solder and cracking balls disagrees, as also evidenced by the large amount of reflow/reballing services and the fact that reliability-critical applications like aerospace still use leaded solder and more expensive solder columns instead of balls.
- haneefmubarak 10y agoHere's some info on solder columns for everyone else: http://www.topline.tv/CCGA_column.html http://www.topline.tv/CCGA_column.html While reading that myself, I also happened upon solder springs, which seem like an even niftier idea: http://www.topline.tv/CCGA_MCS_Micro_Coil_Spring.html http://www.topline.tv/CCGA_MCS_Micro_Coil_Spring.html Apparently that company makes the solder springs available also has RoHS safe versions of them, perhaps this could solve the cracking problem? Another company has a paper out which says that you can use their solder column attach process with existing BGA chips: http://www.solderability.com/newsletter082005/ConvertingBGAComponentstoCGA.pdf http://www.solderability.com/newsletter082005/ConvertingBGAC... Could some manufacturer (while unlikely, curious if it's possible) choose to use solder springs with this SSD's BGA package to make it more mechanically reliable when installed?
- rayiner 10y agoOn the last point: storage sizes on laptops have plateaued. I've got a 256gb SSD in my three year old rMBP, and can't see any reason why I'd want more in my new one.
- ghshephard 10y agoVideo. Particularly if you do any HD editing, let alone 4K, you can burn through 100s of gigabytes very quickly.
- Nullabillity 10y agoAnd games. Just my 280GiB Windows partition on my laptop is hovering around 90% full constantly. Unless you only use the computer for editing text then storage requirements are growing quicker than ever.
- Veratyr 10y agoOr Photography. My Lightroom catalogue alone is 60GB. My photos several hundred GB.
- desdiv 10y agoI'm shopping for a rMBP and the 256GB flash thing is a big problem. I need OSX + Xcode for the occasional iOS app development, but mostly use Windows. OSX + Xcode and a few iOS emulator images is easily 100GB, so that leaves me with only 156GB on the Windows partition. I don't mind paying for the higher end 512GB rMBP, but the discreet graphics is a deal-breaker for me. Thus I'm left with configuring the baseline integrated graphics rMBP with 512GB flash.
- neic 10y agoHow come the discrete graphics is a deal-breaker if not for the price? Battery life?
- ptomato 10y agobattery life is one, but personally I would prefer an otherwise max-spec RMBP with integrated graphics only, especially with the Skylake refresh - historically the swap between the two has been less than reliable, and the modern integrated options are adequate for non-game purposes.
- simtr 10y agoI think you missed one of the big advantage/disadvantages, non-replaceable components let the manufacturer add their own premiums on higher memory/storage variants.