Old thinking about 7200rpm drives
Apple upgraded the MacBook Pros this morning. (I had mentioned to several friends that I thought today would be the day FWIW) There are a lot of nice incremental improvements, especially the increased RAM capacity and the return of the FireWire800 port.
But, as is always the case with Apple’s revisions, people are finding something to complain about. The one I noticed first was the complaining about removal of 7200rpm drive options — the only HD choices are 4200 and 5400 rpms. (MacUser deleted a whiny post before I could comment on it)
This is silly and clinging to past paradigms. As drives get bigger, their data density increases. As there is more data per platter, that data can be read faster without moving the disk as far.
Furthermore, the MBP’s SATA interface is SATA-150. Since 4200rpm drives can mechanically transfer better than that, there’s basically no difference between rpms. Seek times look to be comparable with competing 7200rpm drives as well. These drives spin slower, but they are just as fast as the competition. This is pure engineering efficiency.
So let’s see some benchmarks before shedding any tears for the 7200rpm option. That these slower spinning drives use less power is also a positive. I’ve been looking for months to upgrade my MBP to 200GB but have yet to see the drives for sale at any stores I trust.
Back to the MacBook Pro, what does seem weird to me is the RAM configuration. Why 2GB+1Gb, and more importantly, why not 2GB+2GB? What breaks with 4GB? (I’m sure we’ll know soon enough after someone tries it out and posts what happened)
Update: Here’s the answer to the 3gb question, via John Gruber, who still owes me a shirt. Also see Ross Brown’s comment below for what happens when 4gb is installed.
The Core2 Duo iMacs above 2 GHz seem to support the same RAM configuration — 1 slot with a 2 GB PC2-5300 SODIMM with 1 GB in the second slot. Ramjet sells that 2 GB part for an astounding $675, and according to their site, in the iMac “If you install two 2Gig SO-DIMMs, OSX will register 4Gigs, but will only be able to use 3Gigs.” An odd limitation.
It’s great that Apple’s notebook offerings finally support more than 2 GB of RAM. Still, OS X and applications are RAM hungry beasts — my G5 can eat up 4 GB with my working app set without hiccuping. I’d love to move back to having just a notebook on my desk — the new machines are plenty fast — but I’d be bumping my head on that RAM ceiling immediately, and swapping is a workflow killer.
Frankly I think the day will come where solid state Nand memory will be the driving force for storage with no moving parts as in the current iPod Nano’s flash memory. This would have a grand advantage as not to destroy data when dropped or worn out through worn moving parts / motors. Also Nand memory is to be much faster than todays conventional HD. Currently Nand memory will take up less power, create less heat than todays current HD’s and help contribute to longer battery life with laptops, devices & tablets. Perhaps this will not be Nand memory, but another memory technology that hasen’t come yet, but it should be coming around the bend sometime, somewhere. Nand memory could also boost the boot time of the computer OS significantly.
The interesting thing about using Nand memory or any high speed memory as a HD replacement is that it will also make virtual disk storage semi-mute as the memory of the laptop and the storage of the laptop become inter-changable. This means as systems move to 64-bit systems they can run with 16GB of RAM and take away from storage, or 8GB of RAM for 32-bit systems giving more storage space. Additional storage could be as close & simple as adding additional chips, or USB memory keys. However we would be limited to the speed of the USB bus, where the chip can potentially have much greater throughput of data. Perhapse adding PC cards into the laptop would be a better more elegant solution to adding storage in a RAM based manner with better data throughput.
Hopefully I am either right, or a better more brilliant storage solution emerges and proves me very wrong. Either way, I welcome advances here as I plan to fully take advantage of them as they appear. I can never have too much, or too fast memory / storage.