Solid State Hard Disk Drives
Solid State Hard Disk Drives (SSD), or at least the idea of them is taking the industry by storm. Like many new technologies, expectations are high, but on the hype vs. delivery continuum, the technology is currently leaning much more toward people saying that they’ve heard 200% performance increases and 8000% reliability improvement over traditional hard disk drive (HDD) technology. (Personally, what I’ve heard is that if Ferris dies he’s giving his eyes to Stevie Wonder.)
For those that may not be familiar with the technology, traditional hard disk drives that are the standard for data storage today have some limitations. They are the single biggest performance bottleneck in a system. They are also relatively fragile. SSD is used in place of a traditional HDD. It replaces the spinning platters with solid state “flash” memory. The promises are much improved reliability and performance.
Lenovo does not currently offer solid state HDDs as options on our products, but customer demand is increasing. We want to be sure that what we offer will meet customer expectations.
I wanted to look at some of the technical aspects of the technology and a bit about the state of the industry as it pertains to us for incorporation into our products. Before we begin, I am indebted to Don Frame and Jeff Hobbet here at Lenovo for providing much of the technical content. Thank you.
There are four axes to examine with regards to SSDs: performance, reliability, power consumption and cost. As with any technology, there are tradeoffs, especially with the first generation of drives available now.
Performance
Today’s’ drives offer very fast random access and read transfer rates compared to hard disk drives. On the other hand, they have very slow write performance. Programming and erasure account for much of this. Performance numbers are inconsistent and very dependent on factors like percentage of space used and file fragmentation. Plus, performance tends to degrade over time. This is definitely a time when the choice of benchmark will affect results. Those benchmarks with sequential reads or writes will have markedly different results than those testing with random reads and writes. Internally, our team has benchmarked performance to be anywhere from 3X the performance of a hard drive to less than a standard hard drive. Proceed with caution when someone throws numbers at you. For future generations, Lenovo is working with suppliers to implement write buffering techniques and algorithms to minimize performance lag.
Reliability
There is no question that solid state drives are much more robust than a standard hard drive. They have approximately 6X the shock resistance and a 20% improvement in temperature range. On the other hand, while the drives are more robust, the underlying technology still has limitations. Inside the drive the NAND technology has a 100,000 erase cycle lifetime for a single level cell or 10,000 erase cycle lifetime for a multi-level cell. Multi-level cells are used to increase capacity.
User and operating system scenarios exceed program lifecycles of the technology. Things like swap file usage or even a user defragmenting a disk add write cycles which can cause premature wear. This can be mitigated by wear-leveling algorithms which spread out usage across the memory cells, but this is still technology in its infancy. Lenovo’s engineering teams have been working with suppliers to ensure that there are not data integrity or corruption problems. This is a partnership to help SSD suppliers mature their technology and improve erase cycle limitations. In addition, it is likely customers will require encryption options to secure their data. Our engineers are working on that too.
Power Consumption
Solid state HDDs promise to save power compared to traditional hard disk technology. And they will. However today’s generation of SSDs have no power savings benefit compared to traditional HDDs. The big reason is that current SSDs with a Serial ATA interface are actually Parallel ATA hard disk drives with a serial bridge chip. They don’t offer support for low power interface states and the architecture has a potential for data-losing error conditions when recovering from a low power state like suspend or hibernate. In the future, there will be native SATA solutions which will solve many of these problems and will at the same time offer a real power savings benefit which should increase battery life.
Cost and Capacity
This can’t be overlooked. There is no question that SSDs cost more and are not available in as large capacities as standard hard disks. Today 32GB drives are common with 64GB starting to appear. Even the 32GB drives are extremely expensive, somewhere around $600. 64GB goes for much more. With time, that cost will drop and the available capacities will increase, but for most customers these are prohibitively expensive and too small right now. For others, the cost is nothing in return for the increased reliability they would gain. For example, I’m sure the Williams Formula One racing team that Lenovo sponsors would gladly spend the money for the increased reliability of a solid state drive in a high-vibration environment.
SSDs will take the notebook world by storm. It just won’t be quite as fast as many people think. Our engineers are optimistic that current limitations will be overcome. Data is THE most important part of any notebook and we want to be sure that customers can continue to be satisfied with their ThinkPad investments.
August 27th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
I’d love to see SSDs in ThinkPads, if they get to the point there’s a good speed gain and weight savings–but realistically, since I have the better part of my 80GB drive full now there’s no way I’d buy one until 128GB SSDs get to be cheap, which I’m sure is years away still.
August 28th, 2007 at 2:15 am
Why would you want 64GB in your laptop? For most business use of a laptop, that is to store the operating system and some other software, plus personal stuff and whatever you are working on, 4GB should be fine. For my own personal use, I store a lot of photos and music so that’s another thing. I would like as large drive as possible. But not on my work computer.
The fact that swap and defrag hurts your flash is a bit of a “doctor, it hurts when I cut my arm” thing. “Don’t do that then.” RAM is much more suited as a primary storage space than flash. Swap space was good when primary storage was expensive and disk was suitable to augment it. Flash isn’t. So buy some extra RAM instead.
As you might understand by now, I’d love to use SSD in a laptop. I would cherish the reduced weight and power requirements (I hear you about SSD disks not powering down, that needs to be fixed obviously). I would also love a LED backlit screen for the same reasons! I love my Thinkpads and I would buy a new small portable as soon as these technologies are available for them!
August 28th, 2007 at 3:59 am
A popular hardware site (anandtech) recently compared an off the shelf solid state drive with a typical notebook drive and found the power win was very strongly in favor of the SSD already. The traditional HD required more than 5x as much power during access and they require even more when spinning up.
power at idle/access
SS-HD 0.15W / 0.55W
Seagate 0.87W / 2.89W
Oh, and the SSHD is also totally silent, makes less heat and is smaller.
August 28th, 2007 at 5:47 am
Why has no one mentioned the main reason for SSD. They are totally silent. No more clicking and whining while you are reading.
August 28th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Will an enterprise be willing to adopt a technology like this? Considering how new and untested it is in the business world?
August 28th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Flash drives with S/ATA interface are a fad. My bet is that SD cards will replace both DVD and hard drives. It makes little sense to retain old interfaces and form factors forever. And it’s more economically sound to have a single unified disk format, wether you use it internally or for transfer.
August 28th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Sorry but this sounds too much like an attempt to create an excuse for not providing what the customer is demanding.
SSDs are:
More power efficient
More robust
Faster for general use
Silent
Lighter
Smaller
The X series just begs to have this as an option. Although I personally would not go for one until they reach around 80 gb minimum, I recognize that they are the future of storage for notebooks.
The limited cycles are a non-issue. Modern SSDs are intelligent enough to distribute the “wear” evenly and therefore bring expected life up to more than what most people keep their notebooks for. Plus, I would rather be able to view by means of software how many cycles I have left than try to guess when my HDD will die.
Give us an LED back lit, higher resolution screen on the X series along with SSD storage and we will gladly pay for it!
One of the Thinkpad’s strengths is that it is unique and differentiated (for example, nobody else has a trackpoint device, though there are poor imitations); play on that strength and make higher end features available, don’t let it become a commodity.
August 28th, 2007 at 11:42 pm
I am certainly excited to see that lenovo is thinking about SSD drives as an option in their notebooks. Fujitsu and possible some other vendors already include SSD drives in their laptop lines.
What I would really like to see more information on is full hard disk encryption. http://www-604.ibm.com/webapp/.....8425314371 shows that a 2.5″ notebook drive is available, but only supported in the latest models. Who do I have to talk to for a X60 or T60 / T60P bios that supports these drives? I can see these types of drives being adopted much sooner than SSD due to corporate policy, government policy, etc. While there are COTS solutions out there, they rely on windows and this solution sounds like its built into the drive, and leverages the TPM chip. Please let me know who I can talk to, and I would be willing to beta test for you guys. Thanks.
-Garrett
August 29th, 2007 at 3:33 am
First of all, this is a great blog, the posts and comments provide valuable information.
As for this post, ok, you convinced me in the storage front. It would be nice to have some explanations on the display front now: I’m a lot more interested in LED backlit screens than in SSDs right now. Why don’t we have LED backlit screens? I’m about to buy a laptop and the fact that the new MacBook Pros are offering LED backlit screens made me wonder if the T61 is really the best option for me.
August 29th, 2007 at 6:02 am
I love the SSD .hope to see it on Thinkpad T62 on 2008 soon
August 29th, 2007 at 7:11 am
Great Article – I learned a few things I did not know about SSD
However, I agree that it does read a bit like “excuses why Lenovo has no SSD option”. Overall though, I think the point is that SSD technology is not for the mainstream just yet – but perhaps in the near future. I am excited for the possibilities that it will bring to the notebook front. Perhaps the only technology that could eclipse its importance to mobile computing is some sort of vastly improved battery technology.
August 29th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
There is nothing stopping somebody from purchasing a SSD from Newegg (for example, no I don’t work there) and installing it into a Thinkpad. I am thinking about doing just that in a year or so when the prices come down a bit more. Has anybody tried this?
August 29th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
@ Shad
This is precisely why LED backlighting is more interesting to me in a ThinkPad than SSD. The new Fujitsu T2010, Toshiba R400, and Compaq 2710p tablets all feature LED backlighting (as does the upcoming Dell Latitude XT tablet). Why doesn’t the X61t? While the X61t is an excellent machine, including the unusual IPS-type display, the loss of brightness and battery life of CFL versus LED makes it difficult to recommend to most users.
August 30th, 2007 at 4:58 am
Shad Says:
“There is nothing stopping somebody from purchasing a SSD from Newegg (for example, …) and installing it into a Thinkpad. … Has anybody tried this?”
I bought an SSD and installed it in a laptop. First off, I should say that it was only an 8 GB SSD, and that was dear enough. I installed it in a Compaq m200, which is quite an old model, but in many ways a fantastic little machine. I installed Windows 2000, which is quite happy in such a small drive.
I expected this ageing machine to be transformed – to run for longer on its batteries, to be quicker and quieter. I have to report that I’ve hardly noticed any difference.
Allan
August 30th, 2007 at 6:34 am
I understand current scepticism regarding SSD drives. It is too early.
On the other hand, in the meanwhile Lenovo could make booting from USB flask disks, CF card (or other memory card types) a bit more friendly. I guess it needs better BIOS support and provide an utility to make a USB flash disk bootable (as HP did recently).
August 30th, 2007 at 8:30 am
How about a SSD for the OS and file system journal, with regular HD for the data storage. As most disk access is to the OS, that would allow the loud, fragile & power greedy HDD to only be used when user documents are being altered (which is rare compared to the level of activity on the OS partition/drive).
August 31st, 2007 at 6:19 am
Well, let’s quote from a TechSpot article called “Seagate to enter solid-state disk market”…
— Quote —
Interestingly, the CEO of Seagate had some rather harsh words to say about existing SDD manufacturers, claiming their supporting technology is outdated:
Besides, the storage component–flash chips or magnetic platters–are only one component of a drive, said Watkins. There are also chips, boards and lots of software. … “This has a million lines of code in it,” Watkins said, holding up a hard drive. “The million lines of code make it a solution.” … The flash-based notebooks on the market today, he said, are “ten years behind.” …
————–
Of course Seagate doesn’t want to be left behind and thus will try to get a piece of the SSD cake. IMO the SSD market is still on it’s early beginnings and it will need some time to establish price vs. value based SSD drives. – Actually SSDs are still too capacity size limited and also too pricey on the market, so only gadget hunters and early adopters are after them.
Thus I would offer them actually more as an option for Thinkpads in order to keep the TP prices on normal levels.
September 1st, 2007 at 3:54 am
I dont know in what world Matt lives. He seems to have no clue (or ignoring it deliberately) that lenovo is already offering flash based partial HD substitution, called turbo memory.
His comments about SSD:
-performance of them depends on percentage of space used.
turbo mem is certainly always 90% full, so turbo mem has low performace, ie is useless?
-perfromance tends to degrade over time.
Not true for NAND flash based turbo mem?
-3x to less than standard HD performance.
So what is then the point for turbo mem if it is only 3x faster to 3x slower than a regular HD?
-only 10000 erase cycles.
So the turbo mem is trash after a few weeks?
turbo mem is used for MS Windows ReadyBoost, “additional memory cache” (Intel)
-user and operating system scenarios exceed program lifecyces of the technology.
If thats true then is certainly true for the small size (1GB) heavy usage turbo mem
-causes premature wear.
certainly true for turbo mem if used as swap
I havent heard that turbo mem has wear leveling algs either
-cost.
1GB turbo mem is much more expensive, per GB, than 32GB SSD, and lenovo nevertheless offers/builds them into their laptops.
leave out the Active Protection System for regular HDs when using a SSD and overall costs come down, see entry in “ruggedized machines”
Matts world is upside down, no clue about technology.
SSDs (just for the overview, no, I am not working there, i have seen chaper ones at other places)
URL removed
September 3rd, 2007 at 8:39 am
Toby – there is a big difference between Intel Turbo Memory and a SSD – a BIG difference, I submit it is you that does not really have a clue about technology other than what you can cut-and-paste without actually understanding.
September 4th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
For those who think this is a bit of an “excuse” post, you’re right on some level. But on the other hand, if you think about our primary market — business — they want rock solid. Any technology has to be reliable and until we’re sure that it can perform in thousands of machines, we’re not going to use it. We WILL have SSDs and most likely sooner than reading this post would have you believe.
September 4th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
Garrett, if you and others are interested, I can post on Full Encrypting HDDs in an upcoing post. Part of what is required to make these work is, as you said, an updated BIOS. It also needs to support things like extended length passphrases and have some additional hardening necessary to protect the drive. It wasn’t feasible for us to go back and rearchitect a previous generation system to accomodate this. We’d likely break more things than we’d fix.
Also, these will likely be what corporations want to use eventually, but for now, their primary weakness is that they’re unmanageable from a centralized perspective. With time that will change, but if you deploy it today, you have no way to centrally reset a password without physically visiting the machine. This alone makes it a no-go for widespread corporate use.
September 5th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Add me to the list of who’d like to know why the x61’s don’t have LED backlighting? few LED’s can’t cost all that much more than a CFL right?
Seriously I can understand how it could be, but it does seem strange that the negligible difference in part cost is keeping LED backlighting in only top end models, and not in thinkpads at all as of yet.
I’d certainly expect most people would happily pay £20-£30 more for an LED option in a prebuilt machine, and that’s certainly more than the cost LED kits available for DIY TFT backlights. The only thing that would stop me wanting to try to install a kit myself would be voiding warranty.
September 6th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
@Yakumo
where are those DIY kits available?
September 8th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
I’ve thought about going with SSDs, but this write-wear issue is a factor I’m concerned about. I don’t want to spend $600 only to find that I have to format the drive every 2 years and replace it entirely after 8 years. I want to use it for far longer.
I suppose that to reduce write-wear you’ll definitely have to have a swap partition or page file stored in RAM so as to not have this constant write-wear on the SSD.
Also, once we all move to SSD and HD technology goes away, we can start to do some exotic things with our laptops. Imagine a laptop that’s no bigger than a box you stick in your pocket. You push a button and a laser-drawn keyboard appears on a table for you to type on. Your trackpad is a laser-drawn square you move your finger inside. Another button pops open a tight fabric screen on wire. CDROMs and HDs are figments of the imagination, replaced by thumb drives and SSD. Your headset connects to the box wirelessly. This is the sort of thing within our grasp in a few years.
Last, imagine how this new Aerogel stuff can be used as perhaps a holographic storage medium instead of the SSD, using lasers to manipulate nanocompounds inside.
September 9th, 2007 at 4:15 am
I predict high end SSDs will have RAM write back caches in the future.
After all, current HDs have many megs of onboard RAM cache already.
Using an OS that writes to disk less would also help. (Linux with NOATIME mount option or BSD)
September 10th, 2007 at 9:14 am
HP Introduces 64GB SSD Option to Business Notebooks
[url]http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3929[/url]
September 11th, 2007 at 5:50 am
I personally feel that SSD will start to make more sense in the 2nd generation and as you point out there are some issues that will be tackled better in the future. However the promise of SSD drives is highly exciting and hopefully we will see them sooner rather then later overtaking current mechanical drives in both capacity and performance.
I as a customer am really excited to see away with the heat, noise and power inefficiencies that regular hard drives suffer from compared to the promises of a no moving parts hard drive.
September 12th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
There is a site dedicated to solid state disks. They have 2 useful articles on write endurance and wear leveling:
http://www.storagesearch.com/siliconsys-art1.html
http://www.storagesearch.com/s.....rance.html
September 13th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
I am in the market for a new notebook and am very interested in a SSD drive. Obviously SSDs must have data integrity — we can’t lose it by going on hibernate or sleep. So I appreciate IBM’s due diligence. However now that Dell has been selling SSDs for many months, users have reported real world benefits, no particular issue, Toshiba now has the R500 with a 64GB SSD, HP is about add it to an armada of his models, it is time Lenovo to offer SSDs as well. I configured a t61p several times all the way to the final shopping cart screen as well as Dell’s and HPs, and stopped short of placing the order for lack of 64GB SSD in the configuration. The benefit in boot times and reliability are just too compelling to get a new notebook with a standard drive. I almost bought the Dell XPS M1330 which does have the 64GB SSD option natively, but the system has no docking station.
SSD customers will buy rich configurations. The vendor that comes up with the right total package including a 64GB SSD option wins my business.
September 16th, 2007 at 11:42 am
SDD’s would be nice, but right now we need larger 7200 rpm or faster hard drives. I am a former IBM’er who bleeds blue, but might have to consider another laptop brand. I am currently using a T43p and maxed out my 100GB 7200 rpm HDD. Other brands are offering high speed HDD’s at 160GB or greater. Why is Lenovo taking so much time to release larger HDD’s? It does not make sense for me to get a larger, but slower drive. Anyone have any idea when we will have more options?
September 16th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
The write cycle limitiation is easily overcome. Make a raid 5 of sd cards. As they start to wear, just swap them out. Voila, unlimited life.
September 18th, 2007 at 1:14 am
I would love to see a Lenovo 3000 series with 2 hard drive slots, and the option to load then with any combination of solid state or flash drives.
September 19th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Your blog was thoughtful and informative – thanks.
For the past 38-years that I’ve been involved with computers, disc I/O has been the principle bottleneck limiting overall computational throughput.
The vast majority of high-end users notebook users whether business application types, CAD type folks, gamers or others seem to have applications that generally thrash their drives with many more reads than writes. This appears to be due to the way XP / Vista functions along with current applications.
That said, it would seem to me that if you had a 64 GB SSD within which XP or Vista would reside, along with the principle applications (32 GB is just too small) along with a 2nd HDD drive for data, you would have the optimal price performance solution for a long time.
The facts are the HDDs will lead SSDs in price performance per GB of storage long into the future by an order of magnitude. Moreover, many high-end users are working with large data files, but only working with a limited amount data at any point in time – such as editing one 60 minute HDV movie (9 GB), but wanting to have many movies in storage while on-the-go.
This issue is quite common in large systems configurations and should apply to notebooks as well – the systems performance issues are the same.
This dual drive configuration within a notebook system would then allow you to focus your efforts on a limited size SSD to improve both drive and overall system performance characteristics which are truly important – those things you focused on such as data reliability, read and write time and so forth, rather than running the impossible race of size, which isn’t a race worth pursing from an overall system viewpoint.
In any event, that’s my system design perspective as an old-timer.
September 22nd, 2007 at 4:01 pm
Matt, please have a post on full encrypting HDDs. I have talked to several government organizations and they are all looking forward to built in encryption.
When you say it isn’t feasible to go back and re-architect previous generations, does that mean there will be no support for these drives on slightly older models like the T60p? I can understand the pass-phrase length, but what additional hardening is needed to protect the drive that needs re-architecting?
One topic you hit on was centralized management. Right now I know many companies using WinMagic for encryption, but because its a software level product, it has its flaws. One of them is that it supports windows only. Because encryption is mandatory on many of the machines I operate, and they are dual boot machines, current commercial off the shelf products wont work. But back to management, how do you foresee full disk encryption being managed in a big environment? Because it is low level, I thought physical access would always be needed. WinMagic uses a challege / response system, but I am not sure if the system phones home to a central server to syncronize keys during this process or not.
September 26th, 2007 at 8:06 am
We want SSD in ThinkPad X61s and X61 tablet !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
September 27th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
SSD is the only thing keeping me from ordering a T61p
GET IT DONE!!
October 7th, 2007 at 2:16 am
Hardware encrypted hard drives have kept my company a loyal thinkpad purchaser from the Model 720 circa 1995. Properly implemented, it’s the best protection against a stolen laptop.
While we are anxiously awaiting a Lenovo Thinkpad convertible tablet with a 100gb Solid State Drive, it would have to include hardware encrypted SSDs. Otherwise, value data is too vulnerable. Software options have too many work arounds, room for carelessnes, and back doors.
Please include hardware encrypted 100gb SSDs from day one.
Thanks for listening,
Quincy.
October 14th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Hey, guys:
What’s needed is a SSD in PCMCIA card slot form factor to extend older laptops life by speeding up boot time and shutdown, possibly by having the Windows kernel, drivers, and “hogs” like Office on it. Everything else can stay on the conventional drives until a price/technology breakthrough occurs…SSD drivers a la U3 thumb drives will be needed to allow booting from SSD…probably you one can try this with a PC card adaptor and a cheapo 4GB flash memory card..
October 23rd, 2007 at 7:32 am
I’m in the market for a new laptop. I’ve never found anything that cmpares to thinkpads in terms of build quality and that magnificent keyboard (I also love the light light overhead for the keyboard). That said, I will not buy a new thinkpad until it comes with an SSD – I use my laptop for remoting into work and that ideally entails sitting on my sofa and working away. I can’t do that today due to heat problems with most machines. Heat and noise are key factors for me. I can live with boot times that still drag but if that is solved by getting an SSD then that is yet another factor. I want to wait for a lenovo offering with SSD but my patience is running out – so please try to update soon with this option!
Oh and I just went to your siteand saw the Reserve Edition for $5000. You gotta be kidding me!! It is an X61 with a leather sleeve and some extra support. The price is laughable – shame on you LenovO! DOn’t make me lose total regard for you. Pimping a bog-standard X61 to execs for $5000 is a disgrace and I hope they waken up to this fact and don’t dish out on this total rip off. It is like putting “go-faster” stripes on a crappy car and calling it souped up and flogging it for 2x its worth. There’s my gripe. I hope it doesn’t cloud my other paragraphs
October 25th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
Please add SSD ASAP!!!!
November 25th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
[...] And here is Lenovo’s take on SSD for laptops. [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:41 pm
[...] of their availability within competitive products (as do many of the commenters). Likewise for the reasoning behind not including an SSD option. Indeed, on the latter note, it was interesting to learn today [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
So now that HP, Apple, etc. are shipping SSD – what has Lenovo learned about whether they are reliable? Does swap file kill them too quickly, or what?
March 12th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
[...] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=96 [...]
March 20th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
[...] written about SSD drives before and it probably warrants an update. Like in the last post, I’m indebted to Jeff Hobbet [...]
December 19th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
1) Don’t use ordinary elevator algorithms when accessing SSD-disks. No need for that as ther isn’t any penalty for reading sectors out of order.
2) As someone wrote, don’t use swap space if you can get more RAM instead. It’s faster and don’t wear out the disk (SSD or Old models). If you do, set it to very low priority. We realy want to avoid writing to the SSD-disk.
3) As there is no penalty for accessing out of order on a SSD-disk, you don’t get andy problems with old disks that is nearly full. No need to defrag a SSD-disk.
4) You should use modern file systems that support snapshot, as they don’t write many times on same place.
All this is easy to do in Linux…
December 29th, 2008 at 4:33 am
They are totally silent. No more clicking and whining while you are reading.
December 29th, 2008 at 7:23 am
We want SSD in ThinkPad X61s and X61 tablet !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
April 2nd, 2009 at 9:05 am
[...] laptops will look like just a year or two from now. I’m guessing that they will have much larger solid-state hard drives and include much of the capability that currently give larger laptops a performance advantage. A [...]
April 5th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
[...] laptops will look like just a year or two from now. I’m guessing that they will have much larger solid-state hard drives and include much of the capability that currently give larger laptops a performance advantage. A [...]
September 10th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
[...] working is to fool Windows into thinking the device is not a regular USB memory stick but perhaps a solid-state hard disk which happens to be connected via USB. Yes I know, this is seriously stupid that Windows behaves [...]
January 18th, 2010 at 5:26 am
I put a 128GB Corsair in my 13″ MacBook Pro. OMG!!!! It’s the fastest computer I have ever used, AND and I now get 8 HOURS of battery!