USB is the most prolific pos around. It should never have been adopted as a "high speed" data transfer mechanism, it's okay for most things but not data transfer at high speed. Would love to see Lightpeak becoming the de facto industry standard but I suspect USB3 will rule once again.
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MBP and Solid State Hybrid Drives
- Thread starter bwana
- Start date
USB is the most prolific pos around. It should never have been adopted as a "high speed" data transfer mechanism, it's okay for most things but not data transfer at high speed. Would love to see Lightpeak becoming the de facto industry standard but I suspect USB3 will rule once again.
koffiejunkie
Executive Member
I'm holding out until Seagate (or someone) makes a 500GB SSD with the FDE chip built in. That would be sweet 
Download SuperDuper! and clone your drive. Remember to format the new one with a GUID pertition table instead of Master Boot Record otherwise the Mac won't boot off it. In Disk Utility, choose the drive on the left, click the partition tab, select "1 partition" (or however many you want) from the Volume Scheme tab, and then hit the options button and choose GUID Partition Table.
Ok cool, rectron seem to have it, just need to check stock. How are you cloning? I am going to need some instructions for thisI have an external drive that i can setup as a time machine, will it be possible to use time machine to do a full clone ?
Download SuperDuper! and clone your drive. Remember to format the new one with a GUID pertition table instead of Master Boot Record otherwise the Mac won't boot off it. In Disk Utility, choose the drive on the left, click the partition tab, select "1 partition" (or however many you want) from the Volume Scheme tab, and then hit the options button and choose GUID Partition Table.
I'm holding out until Seagate (or someone) makes a 500GB SSD with the FDE chip built in. That would be sweet
Seagate is an expert at magnetic storage, Intel is the semiconductor manufacturer. State of the art SSDs will come from semi-conductor manufacturers like Intel, Toshiba and others and not magnetic dinosaurs.
koffiejunkie
Executive Member
That's true, but nothing stops Seagate from using Intel's chips - several other manufacturers do already. Seagate is the only manufacturer (as far as I know) with FDE built into their drives though.
Have to say unless I'm using the laptop on the dining room table* I'm loving this new drive. Some processes are only marginally faster but my frequently used apps load up lightning fast.
*There's some sort of resonating going on that is amplifying the drive noise and vibrations that doesn't happen anywhere else.
*There's some sort of resonating going on that is amplifying the drive noise and vibrations that doesn't happen anywhere else.
Have to say unless I'm using the laptop on the dining room table* I'm loving this new drive. Some processes are only marginally faster but my frequently used apps load up lightning fast.
*There's some sort of resonating going on that is amplifying the drive noise and vibrations that doesn't happen anywhere else.
Has it affected power consumption at all?
SlinkyMike
Honorary Master
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This 'hybrid' technology... for the layman - is this merely a normal drive (72000 RPM but otherwise normal) with a massive solid state front side bus or cache? I am confuse.
No idea - I've only had it in since last night and I try not to tax the battery too much if I can avoid it.
koffiejunkie
Executive Member
That sounds promising!
On my MacBook Pro (and on my MacBook before that), battery life suffered a little bit when the laptop is mostly idle (either not being used or doing normal desktoppy stuff - e-mail, internet, etc). But when doing disc intensive stuff, like working in Aperture, battery life is slightly better.
I'm talking about 2 seconds to load aperture and 3 for photoshop.
koffiejunkie
Executive Member
Wow!
None of the above. The drive is a normal drive for all intense purposes with platters, SATA interface, 32MB cache etc BUT they strapped a small 4GB SSD (nand flash technology) to it. It has some intelligent software that monitors most frequently accessed files which it then stores in the SSD so in future it will be read off the SSD portion instead of the platters. I suppose you could call it cache but don't confuse it with the normal 32MB drive cache which you lose when you power off the machine, it's permanent.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/seagate-momentus-xt-hybrid-hard-drive-ssd,2638-3.html
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4GB.
And lose
4GB I picked up, loose I missed.
Nerfherder
Honorary Master
If I look at my windows experience thingamajig it says that everything is 7.2 except for my SATA drive that is 5.2. In other words the only way I can improve my performance is to get an SSD drive.
Not that my PC is lacking in anything but I think that before I spend money on any other components i'm going to get one of these.
Not that my PC is lacking in anything but I think that before I spend money on any other components i'm going to get one of these.
koffiejunkie
Executive Member
This should help battery life. It's conceiveable that, once booted, you might be able to launch a frequently used application with the disc spinned down.
It would be interesting to see how it maps things to the flash memory and what ends up being there.
Nope. The hybrid drive uses more power than a normal HD by default. You have the power consumption from the HD and the SSD which is more. Both have idle states but overall the combined power consumption is still more.
Even normal SSD's don't save you bundles of battery life, some even use more than a normal HD.
koffiejunkie
Executive Member
I know that, but the paper figures only take you so far. Both drives uses much less power while idle than when they're reading/writing. If you are able to read in three seconds something from the flash that would have taken 10 seconds from disc, you're at peak power use for a third of the time, so overall you use less power.
I'm holding out until Seagate (or someone) makes a 500GB SSD with the FDE chip built in. That would be sweet
Download SuperDuper! and clone your drive. Remember to format the new one with a GUID pertition table instead of Master Boot Record otherwise the Mac won't boot off it. In Disk Utility, choose the drive on the left, click the partition tab, select "1 partition" (or however many you want) from the Volume Scheme tab, and then hit the options button and choose GUID Partition Table.
Downloaded it, still waiting on a quote from a friends computer company... he says rectron do stock it... Hopefully get the quote tomorrow and the drive on Friday.
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