4 ms·
SSD speeds have also increased. Prior swap space was incredibly slow, where as today it’s slower than ram but not always human noticeable for many tasks.
by bushbaba 2y ago
SSD speeds have also increased. Prior swap space was incredibly slow, where as today it’s slower than ram but not always human noticeable for many tasks.
- newsclues 2y agoBut ssds are not repairable so it’s going to decrease life of your primary storage. I’d be fine with my MacBooks 8gb of ram if there was a m.2 slot for storage
- havaloc 2y agoI maintain a fleet of 100 PC/Macs. I have never needed to replace an SSD. I have replaced plenty of non SSD drives. Even the 8gb machines will age out before the drives do in most cases. An M1 could be the first machine that could have mainline support and work for the most part for over 10 years. Plenty have people have done that in the past but it wasn't a pleasant experience.
- newsclues 2y agoI have an m1 MacBook Air and it’s fine for most people. I’m not most people, I’m here! I would prefer a replaceable ssd. So I modify my usage of the machine because I rather not kill the ssd. Rather than use it as I see fit and repair wear items. But the keyboard is also a weakness but not essential like boot storage
- Almondsetat 2y agoSwapping constantly kills SSDs though, this is not a good argument. The reality is that power users who should buy an upgraded model like to complain about the base one and the ones petty enough to deliberately go with the 8GB report quick SSD wear because they are overloading it with processes
- brandon272 2y ago> Swapping constantly kills SSDs though This is the conventional wisdom around memory management and swapping yet in my experience a dead SSD in a Macbook is pretty uncommon. They seem to die of about 10 other things first, well into their useful lifespan, including physical wear and tear, worn out ports, etc.
- Almondsetat 2y agoThe situation of base 8GB macbooks wearing down their SSD in the hands of power users is well documented but it's extremely specific. Normal users with 8GB and power users with >= 16GB indeed have no SSD problems because they swap very infrequently
- brandon272 2y ago> The situation of base 8GB macbooks wearing down their SSD in the hands of power users is well documented but it's extremely specific. I can't really find it documented much at all. Conducting a web search reveals that 90% of the user documented concern around this has nothing to do with actual failures but "I'm worried about my SSD failing" or "Will your SSD fail?" discussion. If it is rare, extremely specific, etc. then I think that bolsters the case that it doesn't make sense to increase base RAM out of that concern alone.
- plorkyeran 2y agoPower users with 8GB macbooks being worried about wearing down their SSD is very well documented, but if you have information on how often it's actually a problem I'd love to see it.
- StillBored 2y agoSSD speed as measured by bandwidth. The latency numbers have barely moved in a decade. And swap in operations are 100% a latency test, best reflected by qd=1 random 4k read (well 16k on a mac, but the point remains since the IOP numbers will be roughtly the same with a 4x larger bandwidth at 16k). It's rare to see an SSD that can even do 100MB/sec qd1 random read, and the numbers largely seem to be going backward as the number of bits being packed into each cell increases (ex MLC->QLC) on many products. Bandwidth has always been easy, I had spinning RAID arrays that were faster than your average SSD 15 years ago if the only measure is bandwidth. This is why the xpoint disks were a big deal. 2-3x faster QD1 iops numbers.