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Meanwhile Apple is charging $1,200 for a 1 TB MacBook upgrade. Hoping this year we see a significant jump in consumer availability of these drives. I’ve been us

by memco 8y ago

Meanwhile Apple is charging $1,200 for a 1 TB MacBook upgrade. Hoping this year we see a significant jump in consumer availability of these drives. I’ve been using a 512gb laptop since 2010 at least. Would be nice to start seeing multi-terrabyte drives in devices besides after market or external drives.

jjeaff 8y ago
What would consumer availability have to do with the $1000 apple tax? 1tb SSD are already significantly cheaper than what they are charging. They don't seem to base their pricing on cogs.
- arcticbull 8y ago
  This is the new Apple RAM surcharge — remember back when Apple let you swap out DIMMs, they would charge 3-5x market rate betting you wouldn’t. Now they’re doing it on SSDs but you can’t get away :) If you follow the r/buildapcsales it’s pretty eats to get a 1TB 2.5” SSD from a top manufacturer for under $120, and M.2 for $20-30 more. I just got a Crucial MX500 1TB for $114 all in.
  - ganoushoreilly 8y ago
    I would counter that the SSD's aren't entirely the same. The most comparable consumer NVME M.2 would be the 960 pro and it's still around $300. Definitely cheaper than Apple, but it's also not in the $150 range for the same performance.
    - vehementi 8y ago
      99% of the time SSDs are a boolean: "Do you have a SSD? Yes/No" and performance between different SSDs is basically unnoticeable. Change my mind
      - arcticbull 8y ago
        Definitely relative to a hard drive. Relative to each other what really matters are your 4K random read/write IOPS and some measure of reliability. Back in the day there were in fact huge differences between certain SSDs (Samsung controllers vs. Indilinx Barefoot [1] back in the early '10s). Today it's a non-issue. SSDs years ago saturated the SATA III bus with respect to peak transfers. We're talking an order of magnitude these days, with SATA capping out at 550-600MB/s burst (my MX500) vs NVMe's 3GB/sec (970 PRO). That doesn't paint the real picture to a large extent because 4K random IO is still <<100MB/s in either case. Large DRAM buffers vs. unbuffered can make a big difference too. Reliability these days from any of the big players is usually very good, since their NAND only comes from a handful of big players -- ditto for the controllers. I guess if you buy shady "Kingston" knockoff SSDs with recycled NAND that's a different matter. tl:dr; yep, you're right. Any modern SSD from a big player is a good bet, beyond that it's just gamesmanship.
      - stephenr 8y ago
        > performance between different SSDs is basically unnoticeable Spinning rust drives will likely give you up to ~110 MB/sec. A SATA SSD will likely give you to up ~550 MB/sec, a 5x increase. An NVMe SSD will double the write and quadruple the read speed of a SATA SSD, in 1/3 the size. Yes, any SSD is likely good enough for your average user to feel like a computer is fast. If anything you do is even remotely heavy on I/O, more speed = better.
        stephenr 8y ago
        Downvotes, for the speeds of various storage media? Well done HN, just when I thought you couldn't get more ridiculous, you one upped yourself again.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        lorenzhs 8y ago
        Modern HDDs easily go beyond 110MB/s, but nonetheless stay well below 200MB/s afaik. It'll probably be somewhere in between. Otherwise your figures are fairly correct, if not on the conservative side for NVMe drives (a Samsung 970 Pro will sustain sequential speeds above 3GB/s read and 2GB/s write). But focusing on sequential read speed misses the main improvement that SSDs give you over HDDs: random reads and writes ("seek speed"). Reading or writing lots of small files from an HDD will ruin your transfer speeds unless they're written sequentially, whereas a SATA SSD will do quite well and an NVMe SSD will do really well. This is the cause of the noticeable speedup when you upgrade to an SSD.
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      You are definitely right, an NVMe SSD is going to spank my MX500 in bulk throughput. That is still 3-5X market -- 4X specifically :) in today's market there's no way you can justify a $1200 uncharge from a 500GB to a 1000GB SSD. Of course, Apple doesn't have to, though.
    - JohnTHaller 8y ago
      970 Pro is faster than the Apple Macbook SSDs and about 1/3 the price. $349.99 direct from Samsung for 1TB with 3,500MB/s Seq. Read and 2,700MB/s Seq. Write
dylan604 8y ago
To be fair, the $200 1TB SSD linked above is just a standard 2.5" SSD where the Apple SSDs are M.2 with triple the I/O speeds. These Apple(s) can't be compared to the list of oranges above.
- franciscop 8y ago
  No it is not, I linked to the external Thunderbolt SSD (last one) so there are many more pieces involved in the Samsung SSD. But it's true that the Apple one is a lot faster since it's internal.
  - dylan604 8y ago
    Sure, it connects via thunderbolt, but it's still just a SATA style SSD (max speeds around 550MBps). I'd love to find an external M.2 to get 1200MBps via external, but this seems to be a unicorn still. Although, I'm still happy to have 550MBps on a SATA SSD vs 110MBps via platters.
    - franciscop 8y ago
      Here you go, 3412MBps (read) and 1884MBps (write) for the Samsung X5: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/samsung-x5-portable-ssd https://www.techradar.com/reviews/samsung-x5-portable-ssd Granted, it's a heck lot more expensive at 1TB for $700. It seems the only reason for this drive to exist is actual transfer speed because in any other way seems worse than the T5.
    - stephenr 8y ago
      If you want USB, forget it. The best you'll get from a USB 3.1Gen2 > NVMe case is about 1GB/sec. If you're willing (to pay) and able (to plug it in) to use Thunderbolt 3, there are several commercial products that use an NVMe internally and boast up to 2500MB/sec.
  - akvadrako 8y ago
    I have one of those drives - it's not Thunderbolt, just USB 3.1 gen 2. It's also not a 2.5" drive since it's obviously smaller.
SyneRyder 8y ago
> Meanwhile Apple is charging $1,200 for a 1 TB MacBook upgrade. This is specifically one of the reasons I ended up switching to a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga, even though I'd planned to buy the new MacBook Air. The Thinkpad's SSD is officially user-replaceable and I bought a 2TB WD Blue SSD for less than a third of the cost of Apple's upgrade. Even an NVMe SSD would have been half the price of Apple. One caveat is that although Lenovo has excellent official repair videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqrspYc21PY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqrspYc21PY), I must be doing something wrong, the Phillips & JIS heads in my iFixit Mako toolkit don't seem to fit/grip the Thinkpad's SSD screw. I'm worried I'll strip the screw if I keep trying, so I guess I'll take it to a Lenovo repair shop for some help.
- DKnoll 8y ago
  Sometimes manufacturers put a bit of blue Loctite on the threads... makes the torque needed to initially 'break' the threads/unscrew a bit higher. I wouldn't be that concerned, buying a replacement screw kit for the HDD caddy will be a couple dollars on Ebay if you really do strip the head.
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  I just bought the X1 Extreme with 256gb ssd and 16gb of ram because I can upgrade it later.
  - Infinitesimus 8y ago
    How long have you had it /how do you like it so far? I've been considering getting the 4k version but I worry about battery life. Seems there's a bios/driver bug that keeps the Nvidia GPU running always
    - philliphaydon 8y ago
      Just bought, waiting for it to arrive. There's update bios to fix that issue according to reddit.
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
garyclarke27 8y ago
Agreed I’m still using my late 2013 MBPro with 1TB ssd 16gb Ram, because it feels to me that Apple prices for the 1TB ssd have not reduced at all, I want to upgrade and I can afford it, but I hate being ripped off, so I’m stubbornly waiting for a price drop. I like 1TB because I need to run Windows 10 and MacOS. Apple makes the most reliable windows pc according to some stats (a few years ago) I saw from Microsoft and I believe them, runs Bootcamp Win 10 Office 64 bit Excel v heavy workbooks better than any other machine I’ve tried

by memco 8y ago

jjeaff 8y ago

What would consumer availability have to do with the $1000 apple tax? 1tb SSD are already significantly cheaper than what they are charging. They don't seem to base their pricing on cogs.

arcticbull 8y ago
This is the new Apple RAM surcharge — remember back when Apple let you swap out DIMMs, they would charge 3-5x market rate betting you wouldn’t. Now they’re doing it on SSDs but you can’t get away :) If you follow the r/buildapcsales it’s pretty eats to get a 1TB 2.5” SSD from a top manufacturer for under $120, and M.2 for $20-30 more. I just got a Crucial MX500 1TB for $114 all in.
- ganoushoreilly 8y ago
  I would counter that the SSD's aren't entirely the same. The most comparable consumer NVME M.2 would be the 960 pro and it's still around $300. Definitely cheaper than Apple, but it's also not in the $150 range for the same performance.
  - vehementi 8y ago
    99% of the time SSDs are a boolean: "Do you have a SSD? Yes/No" and performance between different SSDs is basically unnoticeable. Change my mind
    - arcticbull 8y ago
      Definitely relative to a hard drive. Relative to each other what really matters are your 4K random read/write IOPS and some measure of reliability. Back in the day there were in fact huge differences between certain SSDs (Samsung controllers vs. Indilinx Barefoot [1] back in the early '10s). Today it's a non-issue. SSDs years ago saturated the SATA III bus with respect to peak transfers. We're talking an order of magnitude these days, with SATA capping out at 550-600MB/s burst (my MX500) vs NVMe's 3GB/sec (970 PRO). That doesn't paint the real picture to a large extent because 4K random IO is still <<100MB/s in either case. Large DRAM buffers vs. unbuffered can make a big difference too. Reliability these days from any of the big players is usually very good, since their NAND only comes from a handful of big players -- ditto for the controllers. I guess if you buy shady "Kingston" knockoff SSDs with recycled NAND that's a different matter. tl:dr; yep, you're right. Any modern SSD from a big player is a good bet, beyond that it's just gamesmanship.
    - stephenr 8y ago
      > performance between different SSDs is basically unnoticeable Spinning rust drives will likely give you up to ~110 MB/sec. A SATA SSD will likely give you to up ~550 MB/sec, a 5x increase. An NVMe SSD will double the write and quadruple the read speed of a SATA SSD, in 1/3 the size. Yes, any SSD is likely good enough for your average user to feel like a computer is fast. If anything you do is even remotely heavy on I/O, more speed = better.
      - stephenr 8y ago
        Downvotes, for the speeds of various storage media? Well done HN, just when I thought you couldn't get more ridiculous, you one upped yourself again.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - lorenzhs 8y ago
        Modern HDDs easily go beyond 110MB/s, but nonetheless stay well below 200MB/s afaik. It'll probably be somewhere in between. Otherwise your figures are fairly correct, if not on the conservative side for NVMe drives (a Samsung 970 Pro will sustain sequential speeds above 3GB/s read and 2GB/s write). But focusing on sequential read speed misses the main improvement that SSDs give you over HDDs: random reads and writes ("seek speed"). Reading or writing lots of small files from an HDD will ruin your transfer speeds unless they're written sequentially, whereas a SATA SSD will do quite well and an NVMe SSD will do really well. This is the cause of the noticeable speedup when you upgrade to an SSD.
  - arcticbull 8y ago
    You are definitely right, an NVMe SSD is going to spank my MX500 in bulk throughput. That is still 3-5X market -- 4X specifically :) in today's market there's no way you can justify a $1200 uncharge from a 500GB to a 1000GB SSD. Of course, Apple doesn't have to, though.
  - JohnTHaller 8y ago
    970 Pro is faster than the Apple Macbook SSDs and about 1/3 the price. $349.99 direct from Samsung for 1TB with 3,500MB/s Seq. Read and 2,700MB/s Seq. Write

dylan604 8y ago

To be fair, the $200 1TB SSD linked above is just a standard 2.5" SSD where the Apple SSDs are M.2 with triple the I/O speeds. These Apple(s) can't be compared to the list of oranges above.

franciscop 8y ago
No it is not, I linked to the external Thunderbolt SSD (last one) so there are many more pieces involved in the Samsung SSD. But it's true that the Apple one is a lot faster since it's internal.
- dylan604 8y ago
  Sure, it connects via thunderbolt, but it's still just a SATA style SSD (max speeds around 550MBps). I'd love to find an external M.2 to get 1200MBps via external, but this seems to be a unicorn still. Although, I'm still happy to have 550MBps on a SATA SSD vs 110MBps via platters.
  - franciscop 8y ago
    Here you go, 3412MBps (read) and 1884MBps (write) for the Samsung X5: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/samsung-x5-portable-ssd https://www.techradar.com/reviews/samsung-x5-portable-ssd Granted, it's a heck lot more expensive at 1TB for $700. It seems the only reason for this drive to exist is actual transfer speed because in any other way seems worse than the T5.
  - stephenr 8y ago
    If you want USB, forget it. The best you'll get from a USB 3.1Gen2 > NVMe case is about 1GB/sec. If you're willing (to pay) and able (to plug it in) to use Thunderbolt 3, there are several commercial products that use an NVMe internally and boast up to 2500MB/sec.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  I have one of those drives - it's not Thunderbolt, just USB 3.1 gen 2. It's also not a 2.5" drive since it's obviously smaller.

SyneRyder 8y ago

> Meanwhile Apple is charging $1,200 for a 1 TB MacBook upgrade. This is specifically one of the reasons I ended up switching to a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga, even though I'd planned to buy the new MacBook Air. The Thinkpad's SSD is officially user-replaceable and I bought a 2TB WD Blue SSD for less than a third of the cost of Apple's upgrade. Even an NVMe SSD would have been half the price of Apple. One caveat is that although Lenovo has excellent official repair videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqrspYc21PY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqrspYc21PY), I must be doing something wrong, the Phillips & JIS heads in my iFixit Mako toolkit don't seem to fit/grip the Thinkpad's SSD screw. I'm worried I'll strip the screw if I keep trying, so I guess I'll take it to a Lenovo repair shop for some help.

DKnoll 8y ago
Sometimes manufacturers put a bit of blue Loctite on the threads... makes the torque needed to initially 'break' the threads/unscrew a bit higher. I wouldn't be that concerned, buying a replacement screw kit for the HDD caddy will be a couple dollars on Ebay if you really do strip the head.
philliphaydon 8y ago
I just bought the X1 Extreme with 256gb ssd and 16gb of ram because I can upgrade it later.
- Infinitesimus 8y ago
  How long have you had it /how do you like it so far? I've been considering getting the 4k version but I worry about battery life. Seems there's a bios/driver bug that keeps the Nvidia GPU running always
  - philliphaydon 8y ago
    Just bought, waiting for it to arrive. There's update bios to fix that issue according to reddit.
sureaboutthis 8y ago

garyclarke27 8y ago

Agreed I’m still using my late 2013 MBPro with 1TB ssd 16gb Ram, because it feels to me that Apple prices for the 1TB ssd have not reduced at all, I want to upgrade and I can afford it, but I hate being ripped off, so I’m stubbornly waiting for a price drop. I like 1TB because I need to run Windows 10 and MacOS. Apple makes the most reliable windows pc according to some stats (a few years ago) I saw from Microsoft and I believe them, runs Bootcamp Win 10 Office 64 bit Excel v heavy workbooks better than any other machine I’ve tried