OCZ pushes Agility 2 and Vertex 2 SSD families to 480GB, us further from HDDs
By Darren Murph 
posted May 26th 2010 10:04AM
posted May 26th 2010 10:04AM
It's one thing to have to choose between an ultra-capacious, relatively sluggish hard drive and a cramped, relatively speedy solid state drive, but it's another thing entirely to get the best of both worlds. OCZ Technology is finally pushing laptop SSDs to the 400GB+ range, giving road warriors a fair chance at swapping out their existing HDD without taking a hit in the capacity department. Both the 2.5-inch Agility 2 and Vertex 2 lines are seeing 400GB and 480GB models added, with 250MB/sec read and 240MB/sec write rates promised. The new spinners are slated to hit shelves any moment now, and frankly, we're terrified to even look for pricing.
Did Mac OS X fix the problem where it couldn't handle the speed of the SSDs and the manufacturers basically had to slow their drives down for Mac to prevent it from choking on itself?
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/4/9/ocz-had-to-slow-down-its-ssds-because-mac-osx-cant-handle-the-speed.aspx
So much for paying premium for superior hardware and the software integration.
Not sure what you're talking about, but my MBP 13" flew when I threw a Corsair P128 in it (after updating the firmware to allow SATA2 speed, of course.)
@Proud Japanese
It is interesting then, that in the comments section to the article there are two interesting links that cast a little doubt on the veracity of OCZ's claims in the article you posted.
It would be interesting to see the hardware tested again in a real-world video though.
@Proud Japanese
Mac and SSDs don't mix very well.
First, (afaik anyways) even the latest version of OS X (10.6.3) does not support TRIM.
Second, all of their computers, including the mac "pro" series (pro - haha) still use 3Gb\s SATA, which means all those great new 6Gb\s SATA drives won't run at full speed.
Third, the thing that caused the slowness in the article you are referring to is due to their crappy ass journaling filesystem.
You can turn off journaling...oh wait...you can't turn off journaling on the boot volume on os x...haha, FAIL.
@DoctarPeppar
Yup, just confirmed, no TRIM support in 10.6.3.
Uberfail...even Linux has TRIM!!
@DoctarPeppar
That blows, as soon as prices come down enough I want to stick in an SSD. Ubelievable my premium MacBook Pro with SL does not have that feature...
@Proud Japanese
Mac disk support sucks. Some time ago there was a prospect of switching to zfs, which would've given Macs a great new filesystem (although not necessarily the most tried-and-tested one) and put it ahead of every other OS's default filesystem. Didn't happen and now we don't even have TRIM support.
@xxxsam ZFS was dropped because it wasn't consumer-ready. ZFS is *really* advanced, but it works counter intuitively relative to other filesystems at times. For example, in some cases, deleting a file on ZFS can result in *less* free space being available.
NTFS FTMFW
@DoctarPeppar
I always pointed out how the "pro" laptops were always under featured and under powered...
@DoctarPeppar
6 Gb/s? Neato, makes me want to upgrade my mobo.
But wait a second.. then I'd have to pay an asston to get something that actually uses that much bandwidth, with even a decent capacity.
@DoctarPeppar If it supports TRIM, they blew it.
@aschettler Exactly, if they supported TRIM right now, you wouldn't want to buy the next MacBook Pro that will have TRIM support.
P.S. I don't know if the next MBP will have TRIM or not, I'm just commenting on Apple's shitty practice of feature limitation purely do drive generation based sales instead of innovation based sales.
@DoctarPeppar Actually, I had way better performance in OSX with an earlier model SSD, when Windows was experiencing the "stuttering". None was apparent in Mac. Presumable because Windows is always doing something behind your back that causes disk writing. (Maybe indexing?) And VMs on Mac had awesome performance, too. They were virtually (hah) unusable in Windows because of the drive stuttering. (Not experiencing that with the Vertex || or the Vertex, thankfully.)
DO WANT!
just sell your car instead yea im talkin to you hyundai
...how much?
@metafor If you have to ask....too much
Just a question since it doesn't seem to mention it in the article. Are these SLC or MLC SSD's?
@MegaJapan MLC most likely. there won't be much SLC in the future anyways. MLC tech matured enough to make SLC unimportant for massive storage devices. intel will use MLC for their next generation SERVER SSDs. the successor of the x25-e will be MLC, not SLC. if they trust that for highend server database disks, then it should be enough for us users (and is, having it for long enough by now :))
@MegaJapan Gonna be MLC to be even remotely affordable.
If you want SLC, you'll be waiting a long time or you must have some enterprise database server,
@davepermen
MLC does not belong in the enterprise environment.
The so-called improvements are still no match for the write speed and longevity that SLC offers.
@DoctarPeppar in the end, the whole thing together is what belongs or not into the enterprise environment. and i bet intel knows what they do when they use mlc for that.
120gb SSD = $399
120gb X 4 = 480
$399 X 4 = $1596 !!!! :(
@EddieN
Your math skills are most impressive :)
Spinners?
SSD?
Pretty sure these guys aren't "spinners" ;)
@HaZaRd
Pretty sure they are Spinner of the highest order.
While nice, the price of SSDs needs to keep falling. I can't wait to be rid of standard HDDs. Having a primary SSD for my laptop has just been a blessing.
@bluesolace It will. But much slower than hdd premiums, as the actual cost of the memory drives the high price, not just the that fact that so much more speed is just worth more. One day hdds will be obsolete. When there's that much production and other manufacturing cost reductions they'll most likely match today's hdds GB for GB.
Price? I guess as the saying goes: "if you have to ask ... "
Had the Intel x25 second genration as C drive for 6 mos now, wouldn't go back to HDDs again! Super fast with TRIM in Win7 64bit, looking into getting another one to raid them. the ONLY downside is price but I'm not going to wait for the prices to go down, I'm addicted to the speed now!
Have two laptops. One with Win 7 x64 and a Mac 13". On both I swapped the spinners against OCZ Vertex 250GB in the second half of last year. I will not going back any more! Robust (I already had two dead laptop HD's over the past five years), superfast and silent.
Can't wait until the Vertex 480GB will hit the market here, since my Macbook 250GB is almost full. So, bring 'em on!
Lol. I would be terrified of the price as well. Hopefully in the next year prices will dramatically drop.
Well, I actually found some prices listed. The 480GB Agility (SKU: OCZSSD2-2AGTE480G) listed for $1742.79 and the Agility 400GB (SKU: OCZSSD2-2AGT400G) curiously listed for the same price @ $1742.79. The Vertex 480GB (SKU: OCZSSD2-2VTXE480G) is listed for $1854.79 and the Vertex 400GB (SKU: OCZSSD2-2VTX400G) listed for the same price of $1854.79. Whoa, a tad high for my taste.