This is the most recent mention I could find on apple SSD on Anandtech when he was talking about Mac Pro:
"If you order an Apple SSD, either as an upgrade kit or with your Westmere Mac Pro you'll get a 2.5" adapter for the 3.5" drive sled. While I would've preferred something in-box for all users (since I still recommend going your own route for SSDs vs. buying them from Apple), this is at least a step in the right direction"
and later in the same article:
"I would still like to see Apple offer SSDs as standard, particularly in this price class. On top of that I'd like to see OS X get TRIM support and some faster SSDs as options in the Apple store. SandForce anyone?"
To answer your question, I don't think there would be a difference. A larger drive would take longer to fill up obviously, but other than that they're probably all the same.
What you need to know is whether they have idle garbage collection etc. (explained below) and also what controller they have.
There is also an article on an apple SSD that I will put a link to at the bottom.
I think its more important that you get a better understanding of SSDs so here's some info. Oh, and in my last post I was confused- wear levelling and idle garbage collection are different.
From SSD relapse: Understanding and choosing the best SSD:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/1"A Wear Leveling Refresher: How Long Will My SSD Last?
As if everything I’ve talked about thus far wasn’t enough to deal with, there’s one more major issue that directly impacts the performance of these drives: wear leveling.
Each MLC NAND cell can be erased ~10,000 times before it stops reliably holding charge. You can switch to SLC flash and up that figure to 100,000, but your cost just went up 2x. For these drives to succeed in the consumer space and do it quickly, it must be using MLC flash.
Ten thousand erase/write cycles isn’t much, yet SSD makers are guaranteeing their drives for anywhere from 1 - 10 years. On top of that, SSD makers across the board are calling their drives more reliable than conventional hard drives.
The only way any of this is possible is by some clever algorithms and banking on the fact that desktop users don’t do a whole lot of writing to their drives.
Think about your primary hard drive. How often do you fill it to capacity, erase and start over again? Intel estimates that even if you wrote 20GB of data to your drive per day, its X25-M would be able to last you at least 5 years. Realistically, that’s a value far higher than you’ll use consistently."
Spare room on SSD
"Intel's 80GB X25-M has 80GB of NAND flash on it. That's 85,899,345,920 bytes or 80 x 1024^3 bytes (1024 bytes in a kilobyte x 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte x 1024 megabytes in a gigabyte x 80 gigabytes)."
"How much space is there really on the drive? 80GB. How much space does Windows let you use? 74.5GB. What happens to the remaining 5.5GB? It's used by the drive's controller as spare area.
Intel’s controller is dynamic, it uses the entire drive as spare area until you’ve written every LBA once. Then it relies on the remaining 7.5% of non-user-space as its scratch pad. That’s why its new, out of box, performance is so good.
Other controllers may not be quite as dynamic, but they may also take a smaller performance hit when fully used. Why would Intel work so hard to make its out of box performance so high, even when it’ll be short lived? Because of TRIM."
What TRIM does is help give well architected controllers like that in the X25-M more spare area. Space you’re not using on the drive, space that has been TRIMed, can now be used in the pool of replacement blocks. And as IBM’s study shows, that can go a long way to improving performance depending on your workload."
Keep in mind that this article is old and a lot of these now support TRIM-
"Tying it All Together: SSD Performance Degradation
More spare area is better for random workloads, but desktop workloads aren’t random enough to justify setting aside more spare area to improve performance; most reviews don’t test in a used state, and more users would simply flock to lower price-per-GB drives with less spare area.
Drives that drop the most in performance from new to used state have the most to gain from the TRIM instruction. Depending on how you use your drive of course:
Depending on the scenario, all three controllers have a lot to gain from TRIM. Random write performance drops significantly for almost every single drive. The worst is the Samsung RBB controller, which lost over 70% of its performance between new and used states; Samsung needs TRIM.
Intel made some significant improvements going from the G1 to G2 drives, the new drive loses no performance in our random write test. This is thanks to firmware tweaks and having twice as much DRAM to track data in; the more data the Intel drive can keep track of, the better it is at organization, management and garbage collection. From a pure performance standpoint, the G2 might actually be better for server workloads than the X25-E. In terms of lifespan however, the X25-E has the G2 beat.
Only the Indilinx drives lose an appreciable amount of performance in the sequential write test, but they are the only drives to not lose any performance in the more real-world PCMark Vantage HDD suite. Although not displayed here, the overall PCMark Vantage score takes an even smaller hit on Indilinx drives. This could mean that in the real world, Indilinx drives stand to gain the least from TRIM support. This is possibly due to Indilinx using a largely static LBA mapping scheme; the only spare area is then the 6.25% outside of user space regardless of how used the drive is.
Both Samsung and Intel have a lot to gain from TRIM. Samsung’s performances goes from utterly unacceptable to reasonable (but not price justified) with TRIM. Intel’s performance goes from class-leading to more, er, class-leading."
Some SSDs only have idle garbage collection and I think sandforce controllers are the best when it comes to this-
"Impact of Idle Garbage Collection
The other option that Indilinx provides its users to improve used performance is something called idle or background garbage collection. The idea is that without any effort on your or the OS’ part your drive, while idle, will defragment itself.
It either works by looking at the data on the drive and organizing it into a less fragmented state, or by looking at the file system on the drive and attempting to TRIM based on what it finds. Both Indilinx and Samsung have attempted to implement this sort of idle garbage collection and it appears they do it in different ways. While the end result is the same, how they get there determines the usefulness of this feature.
In the first scenario, this is not simply TRIMing the contents of the drive, the drive doesn’t know what to TRIM; it must still keep track of all data. Instead, the drive is re-organizing its data to maximize performance.
The second scenario requires a compatible file system (allegedly NTFS for the Samsung drives) and then the data is actually TRIMed as it would be with the TRIM instruction.
Presumably this isn’t without some impact to battery life in a notebook. Furthermore, it’s impossible to tell what impact this has on the lifespan of the drive. If a drive is simply reorganizing data on the fly into a better (higher performing) state, that’s a lot of reads and writes when you’re doing nothing at all. And unfortunately, there’s no way to switch it off.
While Indilinx is following in Samsung's footsteps with enabling idle garbage collection, I believe it's a mistake. Personally, real TRIM support (or at least the wiper tool) is the way to go and it sounds like we’ll be getting it for most if not all of these SSDs in the next couple of months. Idle garbage collection worries me."
Bad news about apple SSDs. Remember this article is OLD! Just showing his original attitude towards them. I have no idea whether they use idle garbage collection or not which is why I'm making you do all this reading (sorry) and you can look it up yourself and form your own opinion about whether it's a safe buy. It might actually mention it in the article I'm putting a link to at the bottom (can't remember, I read it ages ago)
"What's Wrong with Samsung?
The largest SSD maker in the world is Samsung. Samsung makes the drives offered by Apple in its entire MacBook/MacBook Pro lineup. Samsung makes the drives you get if you order a Lenovo X300. In fact, if you're buying any major OEM system with an SSD in it, Samsung makes that drive.
It's just too bad that those drives aren’t very good.
This is the 4KB random write performance of Samsung's latest SSD, based on the RBB controller:
4.4MB/s. That's 3x the speed of a VelociRaptor, but 1/3 the speed of a cheaper Indilinx drive.
Speedy, but not earth shattering. Now let's look at performance once every LBA has been written to.
This is the worst case scenario performance we've been testing for the past year:
Holycrapwtfbbq? Terrible.
Now to be fair to Samsung, this isn’t JMicron-terrible performance. It’s just not worth the money performance."
I sorta glanced at the article but didn't bother reading it fully
An issue he had with apple SSD was that it consumed more power than the default Hitachi hard drive, which is actually a big deal because SSDs are meant to run on less power- both when idle and active. He also made a point of saying that since SSDs are more efficient they spend more time idle than they do active and therefore consume even less power than you would expect.
He also mentioned that MacBook Air had an old controller and was limiting. At the top where I showed the most recent mention of SSDs I could find he said the SSDs aren't fast enough and "SandForce anyone?" I think he's taking a stab at whatever their controller is (probably still inferior compared to other SSDs and especially sandforce.
If you're wondering why sandforce is so great:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3690/the-impact-of-spare-area-on-sandforce-more-ca pacity-at-no-performance-loss
here's the article on apple SSD:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2504
Sorry but there are actually more things to consider than price and capacity and many different factors you need to consider-there's also garbage collection, TRIM etc. This info is kinda old now and SSDs have advanced, as i said before I have no idea about apples SSDs except that they're expensive and people seem to think finding alternatives are better. Its like apple RAM, same as any other kind except way more expensive, it's not special or anything- (I forgot who makes their RAM).
Anyway this info is just to help you understand what you need to look for/consider when buying SSDs. I hope this helps, sorry for my lack of knowledge but I do have a very general understanding of how SSDs work (sort of) :P and I read through a few of these articles ages ago so I can at least show you the relevant stuff you need to know...
Enjoy! 🙂
