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I think it's more because of the PCIe interface, and access control and encryption through the T2 chip. The PCIe interfaces SSDs that Apple's been using allow r
by sanketskasar 8y ago
I think it's more because of the PCIe interface, and access control and encryption through the T2 chip.
The PCIe interfaces SSDs that Apple's been using allow really fast speeds of upto 3Gbps, which is almost double those offered by other interfaces like M2 or even more faster than SATA.
What's disappointing is the base storage. 128GB in 2019 is so ridiculous. I would't otherwise mind a soldered SSD when I can just use the TB3 ports to connect external drive with virtually no performance loss. But 250GB internal storage is a necessity especially when the OS itself takes up almost 20GB out of the paltry 120GB.
- isolli 8y agoIs encryption optional? In general I'm more worried of forgetting my password (and thus losing all my data) than of unauthorized access to my home desktop.
- sneak 8y agoIt provides an option to either display a long recovery key at first encryption (which you can store somewhere) or to archive it online with Apple in iCloud so that you have a second key available in the event that you lose your password. But also: backups. make backups.
- moftz 8y agoIf you really don't care about unauthorized access, just write the password in sharpie on the box. I have a bunch of machines hooked up to test equipment that sit on their own network. I just write the username and password on the box and no one ever needs to worry about trying to find the sticky note or find me and ask or waste time guessing. The name of the computer, the username, and password are all the same and reflect what the box setup for.
- Scoundreller 8y agoI do this with wifi passwords on routers. Though I use masking tape.
- derefr 8y agoI also endorse writing the "password when passwords don't matter" on the side of the machine. ISPs have been doing it with their gateway modems for years, and I've never heard of any threat model that calls that out as a problem.
- deepaksurti 8y agoWhy not use a password manager? I use it for every kind of username/password entry. Safe and reliable at least relatively depending on which manager you use.
- donarb 8y agoIf you need a password to log in to your system and decrypt your storage, a password manager is useless.
- deepaksurti 8y agoPassword managers sync across devices and so if you need a password to log in to your system, then you can retrieve it from the other synced device/s. Or am I missing something?
- kojeovo 8y agoThere are better ways to solve the forgetting password problem than turning off encryption.
- sercand 8y agoIt can use the icloud account to encrypt the disk, not a separate password to encrypt.
- atmosx 8y agoYou can always writw it on paper and save it at a physical location where it can be retrieved at a later time or use a password manager.
- jws 8y agoThe two I installed this week are using 70GB and 90GB all set up for development with my files. I think there are plenty of people who needn’t spend on an extra 128GB. Especially since the USB ports are plenty fast for bulk, non speed critical storage should you decide to archive something locally.
- Someone1234 8y ago128 GB doesn't work because it doesn't scale well with age. You can run MacOS or Windows on 256 GB almost indefinitely, even as they grow it would be five or more years before it becomes a headache, to keep 128 GB happy you have to babysit/rebuild semi-regularly. I'm yet to see an OS which doesn't bloat as it ages, even on mobile devices. 30 GB free won't be 30 GB the next major OS update, including rollback files, logs, and so on. OS bloat is also one of the few things you cannot offload to external storage. And I'm someone that ran off of a 128 GB SSD for almost two years. PS - Plus increased resale value will likely pay for itself.
- vetinari 8y agoOn SSDs, you also want as much as free space as possible, to avoid wearing out due to write amplification the few free blocks that are constantly rewritten.
- sjburt 8y agoModern SSDs (last 5 years or so) will wear level by relocating infrequently written blocks.
- reaperducer 8y ago128 GB doesn't work because it doesn't scale well with age As a counterpoint, my 2011 MacBook Air has 128GB, and works just fine. Photoshop, coding, and lots of personal projects. Maybe 128GB isn't enough for gaming, but I don't think that's what the "mini" is for.
- 8y ago
- sneak 8y agoThat’s not what necessity means. I think most users of this device will be fine with 128gb. I think you underestimate cloud usage for this machine’s target market.
- Bellyache5 8y agoI wouldn’t want this little storage onboard, but recent macOS versions do include the feature to automatically shuffle infrequently files up to iCloud.
- voltagex_ 8y agoI'll bite. My parents have got a ~2014 Macbook Pro and 1 megabit upload on ADSL. They're just starting to use "cloud" services like OneDrive. If a large upload starts, no one else in the house can use the 'net. I'm dealing with ~100GB of photos that only have one backup now and it's a nightmare.
- juergbi 8y agoM.2 wouldn't be a bottleneck. It supports up to PCIe 3.0 x4 which has a maximum bandwidth of 4 GBps in each direction.
- iotku 8y agoNVMe specifically, as M.2 is just the connector (which can also use the slower SATA interface) rather than the interface.
- Sephr 8y agoActually PCIe specifically. NVMe improves performance slightly, but it's mostly all due to PCIe. I have a non-NVMe Samsung AHCI M.2 SSD from 2014 that gives me ~2.3GB/s sequential reads and ~1.2GB/s sequential writes, no NVMe required.
- jmull 8y ago> What's disappointing is the base storage. But that just depends on use-case. There are plenty of scenarios where you just need the built-in storage to handle the OS, apps and miscellaneous storage while your large scale storage is external somewhere. Why make people get (and pay for) more storage than they have use for?
- oblio 8y agoBecause storage is cheap for everyone except Apple, that knows they can get 60%+ markup for everything they sell.
- tibyat 8y agomeh, Apple's certainly not alone in their profit margins on upgrades. It's a fairly universal strategy to keep the baseline appealingly low. Dell, for instance, charges $400 to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB RAM on some racks.
- blattimwind 8y agoApple's memory upgrades somehow still manage to be significantly more expensive than the significantly overpriced Dell upgrades.
- cptskippy 8y ago> The PCIe interfaces SSDs that Apple's been using allow really fast speeds of upto 3Gbps AnandTech reported int heir review of the 2015 Macbook that this was just NVMe. Has something changed since then? This is just Apple again trying to pass off a standard as their own innovation to justify their proprietary incarnation.
- mrpippy 8y agoIt's NVMe to the T2 SoC, which acts as the storage controller (among many other tasks). It would be nice to have the raw NAND on a removable card, but the market for "raw-NAND-on-a-stick" would be entirely limited to these machines.
- luka-birsa 8y agoCome on guys, they are just ripping us off. There is no sane reason for removing m2 connector. SSDs can run pcie over m2 and there is no way they run something custom there. Its bullshit marketing that enables them to sell you overpriced ssd and mem upgrades or make you replace your PC faster.
- derefr 8y agoIt's not that they couldn't make m.2 PCIe NAND; it's that nobody else is making m.2 PCIe NAND. The T2's storage controller wouldn't know what to do with any other (NVMe or SATA) m.2 SSD, since then it'd be the T2's storage controller talking to the SSD's storage controller.
- kllrnohj 8y agoThat's incredibly false. Literally everyone makes m.2 PCIe NAND. In fact it's increasingly hard to find M.2 SATA these days with how overwhelmingly common PCI-E 3.0 x4 M.2 is. And M.2 PCI-E isn't just stupid common, it's also cheap. Really, really cheap. 1TB of crazy fast PCI-E nand is $230: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO-1TB-MZ-V7E1T0BW/dp/B07BN217QG/ref=sr_1_2?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1541813007&sr=1-2&keywords=970+Evo https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO-1TB-MZ-V7E1T0BW/dp/B0...
- rvense 8y agoPCIe SSDs are still a common point-of-failure, aren't they? I feel like they should be replaceable.
- btgeekboy 8y agoNot any more so than other major components. Last SSD failure I saw personally was back in the Sandforce days - probably 5+ years ago.
- blattimwind 8y ago> The PCIe interfaces SSDs that Apple's been using allow really fast speeds of upto 3Gbps, which is almost double those offered by other interfaces like M2 or even more faster than SATA. Nonsense. NVMe is an industry standard, M.2 supports it, just like many SSDs. A Samsung 970 Pro SSD does 3.5 GB/s (not Gbps; SATA II already did 3 Gbps well over ten years ago). Incidentally, Samsung 970 Pro SSDs come at a fraction of Apple's upgrade costs.