Apple SSD Guide 2023 | Best Portable MacBook SSD | Techable
Solid-State Drive or SSD has gained mainstream attention over the years despite its cost. Is it really worth to have an apple SSD for MacBook?
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SSD Fresh, anyone heard of this?
- Thread starter Tutman
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That is all wrong, again. Apple acquired Anobit and started making their own SSDs, hardware and software, at that point. Fusion drives are no longer made at all.
the Macs made since 2018 have a T2 bridge that acts as the storage and south bridge and that is an iPhone derived chip which has an onboard storage controller. This technology stack is identical to the storage stack on the iPhone X and newer. These machines don’t even take off the shelf NVMe or SATA SSDs and can’t boot from them at all, though they are supported for additional storage.
Apple pretty much using Toshiba SSDs nowadays, wasn't aware they not currently using Samsung which was present on previous gen, What types of SSD do different series of MacBook Air has? Its differences and specs.Apple SSD Guide 2023 | Best Portable MacBook SSD | Techable
Solid-State Drive or SSD has gained mainstream attention over the years despite its cost. Is it really worth to have an apple SSD for MacBook?
You claim Fusion drivers are no longer made, yet Apple is still selling the latest iMac with Fusion drives, at this point the topic is not only going off topic, but you keep making up as you go, iMac - Technical Specifications
The article stops before 2018 and the T2 chip but here’s a tear down of one of the first T2 Macs: MacBook Pro 13" Touch Bar 2018 TeardownApple SSD Guide 2023 | Best Portable MacBook SSD | Techable
Solid-State Drive or SSD has gained mainstream attention over the years despite its cost. Is it really worth to have an apple SSD for MacBook?
The onboard SSD just has some toshiba NAND chips, no controller. It is connected to the T2 chip. The T2 firmware has been decrypted thanks to the recent jailbreak and the driver stack is identical to iPhones, the SSD is connected via a proprietary bus to the T2, with a controller core inside the T2 that runs storage firmware, and all of that is exposed to the OS via an emulated NVMe interface.
These are older models they continue to sell. If you look at a recently refreshed model like the 27” and not the 21.5” which was updated in the last year, fusion drives are gone.
Code:
| | +-o ans@77400000 <class AppleARMIODevice, id 0x10000018a, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (316 ms), retain 3114>
| | | | {
| | | +-o AppleASCWrapV4 <class AppleASCWrapV4, id 0x10000029a, !registered, !matched, active, busy 0 (177 ms), retain 5>
| | | | {
| | | +-o iop-ans-nub <class AppleA7IOPNub, id 0x10000018b, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (177 ms), retain 9>
| | | | {
| | | | "segment-names" = <"__TEXT;__DATA">
| | | | "IOPersonalityPublisher" = "com.apple.driver.RTBuddy"
| | | | "role" = "ANS2"
| | | | "CFBundleIdentifierKernel" = "com.apple.driver.RTBuddy"
| | | | }
| | | |
| | | +-o RTBuddyIOReportingEndpoint <class RTBuddyIOReportingEndpoint, id 0x1000003c9, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (5 ms), retain 6>
| | | | {
| | | +-o RTBuddyService <class RTBuddyService, id 0x1000003cf, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (147 ms), retain 7>
| | | | {
| | | | "IOProbeScore" = 0
| | | | "CFBundleIdentifier" = "com.apple.driver.RTBuddy"
| | | | "IOMatchCategory" = "RTBuddyService"
| | | | "IOClass" = "RTBuddyService"
| | | | "IOPersonalityPublisher" = "com.apple.driver.RTBuddy"
| | | | "IOProviderClass" = "RTBuddy"
| | | | "CFBundleIdentifierKernel" = "com.apple.driver.RTBuddy"
| | | | "role" = "ANS2"
| | | | }
| | | |
| | | +-o AppleANS3NVMeController <class AppleANS3NVMeController, id 0x1000003d7, registered, matched, active, busy 0 (60 ms), retain 20>
| | | | {Here's where the storage device sits on a jailbroken Mac's T2 chip. It exposes an emulated NVMe controller using a different driver stack, and is not connected to PCIE at all. The "RTBuddy" system is Apple's coprocessor subsystem, Apple in 2018: what's new , and the memory addresses for those CPU cores are inside the T2 chip.
This isn't something off the shelf and doesn't even appear to be NVMe. And the evidence is even more clear when it crashes:
Code:
panic(cpu 0 caller 0xfffffff00ac4bee4): ANS2 Recoverable Panic - assert failed: [7442],src/drivers/apple/ans2/cmd_accelerator/cmd_accelerator.c:345:cmd fetch error for host 1 I/O SQ, rresp code 2, status_reg: 0x2100 - aspcore timer tick(17)
assert failed: [7442],src/drivers/apple/ans2/cmd_accelerator/cmd_accelerator.c:345:cmd fetch error for host 1 I/O SQ, rresp code 2, status_reg: 0x2100
RTKit: RTKit_iOS-1264.100.25.release - Client: t8012.release-AppleStorageProcessorANS2-717.120.1~65~717.120.1~65Those are Apple source file names. The build versions are Apple project names and version formats we see stamped on various other Apple projects, and the version numbers are very related to what is seen on reverse engineered iOS all the time.
Before T2, Apple used a lot of off-the-shelf rebranded SSDs, but after T2, they are running the iOS style SSD controller on the T2 chip and the NAND modules outside of T2 look a lot like just bare NAND chips without a controller. A controller has a CPU and substantial RAM, and that's internal to T2 now and running Apple firmware.
P.S. More bewildering, on T2 machines that support SATA HDDs, the HDDs are also plugged into the T2 bridge chip, and they also get tunneled up to the Intel side as "NVMe" hard drives by the same AppleANSNVMeController
. Never thought I'd see a NVMe rotating drive!
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Anyway back on the topic of SSD usage, here's my oldest Windows machine that I use regularly. I got this machine about a year ago, and it runs Windows Insider Fast Ring builds with no changes. So it's read/written around 5TB with barely more reads than writes, and overall SMART estimated capacity use is 2%. So at this rate it will last 50 years according to SMART data. (And if you want to extrapolate based off the active used hours, it's 278 days of continuous usage so far so 38 years of continuous usage at the same rate)
It doesn't seem to me like there's a lot of value to changing these settings, unless you have one of those first generation SATA SSDs that had extremely low endurance.
It doesn't seem to me like there's a lot of value to changing these settings, unless you have one of those first generation SATA SSDs that had extremely low endurance.
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- Mar 16, 2019
- 3,936
@MacDefender Does restoration of system images many times hurt SSD? In the last 2 months I have restored system image 10 times at least for various reasons. I don't know the technical details about what happens when you restore system images, whether it's as simple as deleting all of current data and restoring from the backup image or something else also happens. Does doing it too many times hampers SSD in some other ways and does reformatting like you do while installing windows improve anything?
I'm planning to reinstall windows to stop my madness, install only the required apps and not restore system image again unless there's a reason to do so.
I'm planning to reinstall windows to stop my madness, install only the required apps and not restore system image again unless there's a reason to do so.
It mostly just increases the wear. As you can see from mine, 5TB of writes consumed 2% of the drive. For the most part, the automatic TRIM optimizations that Windows will do will discard all of the previous blocks and there isn't any long term performance implications.
- Apr 17, 2020
- 542
@MacDefender What is your opinion on the claims of Ashampoo Winoptimzer 18 from my post #36 here: Q&A - SSD Fresh, anyone heard of this? ?
I haven't researched this product much other than what the description says. I think in general spending money on optimization products is probably not the best use.
Almost all defragmentation tools are built on top of the same Windows APIs. It is generally not necessary to defragment a SSD, and a SSD gives you much much better performance than a hard disk, so in terms of defrag tools I would just stick with the standard Windows one or something like JKDefrag, which is free and open source and implements the same kinds of algorithms: JkDefrag v3.36 (kessels.com). Again, these days, if your system drive and most of your applications aren't on a SSD, you really should get them on an SSD. Any SSD is faster than a defragmented HDD will ever hope to be, and there are a wide number of lower-cost SSDs where you can get a TB or so of storage at a reasonable price.
(In terms of why you should defrag a SSD, one reason is for repartitioning to consolidate space. And if you have something like a database server or a device that's many years old, a make-all-files-contiguous light defrag might actually be helpful to reduce number of IO's, but that's maybe a yearly or less frequent thing. It's not like a HDD where even a week's worth of fragmentation can seriously slow down daily tasks)
The other optimization and monitoring features, I don't see a detailed enough description for me to understand if it's worth it. It seems to have some interesting functions built in that might make it easier to change certain settings like Windows's telemetry, but it seems like the bulk of the functionality is something available for free or included in an Internet Security AV package, or just probably doesn't need to be done.
I'm curious if others have a different experience though. I remember in the early 2000's the necessity of using things like Norton Utilities to clean up Windows, as apps did a terrible job of leaving broken references in the registry and it could actually break the right click menu or cause other weirdness. I just honestly haven't seen anything like that happen since Windows 10 if not earlier.
- Apr 17, 2020
- 542
I have SSD for system drive now also but still use WinContig for my games drive (HDD) which is free and just recently updated. I posted about it here: Update - Wincontig version 3.0 update & test! It is pretty nice if you haven't tried or tested it. And thanks for the reply!
