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Acer Aspire S7 Ultrabook: Acer's Best Foot Forwardby Jarred Walton on 1/7/2013 4:30 AM EST
- Posted in
- Acer
- Intel
- Ivy Bridge
- Laptops
- Aspire S7
- Ultraportable
- Ultrabook
54 Comments
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mforce - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkI find it seriously difficult to justify spending more than 500$ on a laptop. I don't make that much but even if I did ... I'm not really sure what justifies and over 1000 $ price for a laptop, it's just way too much.
And the fact that it's an Acer doesn't help things much, let's face it, Acer doesn't really have a premium brand and it's not Apple. If I'll want to sell it right after I buy it I probably won't get more than 1000$ for it.
Besides even cheapo laptops often last quite a long time, I have an Acer I paid 400$ for and it's still running just fine 4 years later. Reply
Romberry - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkIt's a conundrum eh? People like to complain that Windows-based notebooks aren't up to the build quality of Apple's MacBooks that go for well over a grand, but when confronted with a Windows-based notebook that rivals (or meets and in some cases exceeds) the build quality of Apple's MacBooks, the same crowd that bemoans the quality of the sub-500 dollar Windows machines balks.
You can have cheap and (hopefully) acceptable, or you can have quality and the price that comes with it. If you're a 500 dollar and under laptop kind of person, then obviously this product is not for you.
Personally? I tend to agree that paying well over a grand for a laptop is very hard to justify for most people. I wouldn't do it. Example? I'm typing this post on an old (five years plus) Dell Inspiron e1505 running a Core Duo (not Core 2) processor , 1680x1050 display, 4 gigs of RAM and a 500 gig Hitachi hard drive with 32 bit Vista Ultimate. Bought two of these in May of 2007 for about 500 dollars a whack new from Dell on special, one for me and one for my daughter. Does everything I need it to do and is comfortable like an old shoe.
I have a Dell Latitude 6400 in the next room (Core 2 Duo P9600 at 2.66 GHz, 8 gigs RAM, 1920x1200 display, 128 gig Samsung 470 SSD primary drive, 500 gig WD Scorpio Black in the expansion bay in place of the optiical drive.) that I paid all of 400 dollars for off lease two years ago. (Added the SSD, upgraded the RAM and installed Win 7 x64.) It mostly sits unused because of the old shoe factor with the Inspiron.
Neither are sleek or easily portable, but they are functional, stable and reasonably fast for what I do with 'em.
I'm not sure just how big a market there is really for high end laptops. Apple sells a lot of MacBooks in terms of units, but in terms of overall market share...not that much. MacBooks are a niche. I think Winbooks built to these high standards are likely to be niche products as well, garnering about the same 3-5 percent share of the overall market as MacBooks. (Of course for many people I think those Apple MacBooks are as much a fashion accessory as they are a PC. Winbooks will likely never have that sort of purposeful snob appeal cachet. Then again, not everyone wants to be a snob.) Reply
blue_urban_sky - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkI agree with your statement about PC laptops not being able to win as they either feel cheap because they are or are too expensive. I would however like to draw some comparisons
Galaxy S3 ~ £400
iPad4 3g 64gb ~ £650
so £1000 for an ultra-book is not out of place, Don't get me wrong they are all expensive and products like the nexus range start to chalenge these premium prices.
Just so my bias is clear I own a S3, nexus 7 and brought my wife a yoga 13 for xmas as she is a dev and commutes with her laptop on the train so I wanted to find a nice light one. She loves it so money well spent. Reply
mforce - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkSure but Nexus devices are cheaper and still quite good. And besides smartphones and tablets are all the rage these days , I don't think such a device can match that. Reply
Death666Angel - Monday, January 07, 2013 - link200€ for a Nexus 7, 300-350€ for a Nexus 4, 400€ for a Nexus 10 and ~150-200€ for about any dual/quad A9 Chinese tablet and smartphone with specs similar to the current high end crop (800p, 1080p, 1200p ips screen @ tablet, 540p or 720p @ smartphone, 4-32GB NAND, 7.4Wh/25Wh batteries etc.). So I would argue that the prices you mention are just as overpriced. Reply
blue_urban_sky - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkAlthough there is an argument that the high end products profits from manufacturers like Samsung, LG and Apple (tho indirectly) go toward the R&D of next gen hardware. I cannot see those same chinese manufacturers coming out with a flexible display until the tech is matured by one of the larger players at significant cost.
Overpriced is strong term, as mentioned in the article the PC community have enjoyed a race to the bottom with little thought to anything other than Power/Price. I for one am glad that companies are looking to push toward aesthetics. If a Bugatti Veyron costs £2M, Aston Martin Vanquish costs £180k and Suzuki Alto costs £6k which one is better to get a pint of milk from the store in? and would you really like to live in a world where there is no "Wow"? Reply
Death666Angel - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkThen disregard the Chinese offerings, but a Nexus 7 at 200/250€, a Nexus 4 at 300/350€ and a Nexus 10 at 400€ still significantly undercut his listed devices while offering comparable to arguably better specs.
As for the rest of your comment that car analogy has nothing to do with my comment and you are reading things into my comment that are clearly of your own mind. Reply
blue_urban_sky - Tuesday, January 08, 2013 - linkThe car comparison was just to illustrate that overpriced is highly subjective. The initial prices included the statement that the nexus range were challenging the sector, although google is not interested in profiting off these devices themselves.
I would think that these ultrabooks are not big earners due to high development costs and low unit sales, So rather than overpriced I think that maybe they are just expensive. Reply
mforce - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkI was just saying that Acer can't expect people to pay as much for their brand as they do for Apple or Sony ( if you want Windows laptops ) and that's the reality. Given the choice almost anyone would choose an Apple or Sony product ... sure it may not be better and I know that but this is how it works.
Also I find the touchscreen on a laptop a bit useless maybe, I don't find myself using it much. I'd rather have a mouse :D Reply
blue_urban_sky - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkPoor old Acer, If they are trying to up there game good on them I think they know it will be an uphill battle winning consumers over and maybe they have made a product that is very well made with quality parts for that very reason.... Maybe. Reply
calyth - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkWell, $500 laptop is fine for most uses, until you try to do anything that generates a lot of heat. Playing a game, converting video, etc etc.
Most of the windows laptop in that range has heatsinks that copes with the average uses, but any spikes, and it would just wear out pretty quickly over time.
While MacBooks may have that aluminum frame advantage (in terms of heat dissipation), none of the current line up use anything particularly better than an Intel IGP. Getting the 650M requires $1700 bucks or more.
I don't particularly think that Acer's attempt here is bad, and Windows laptop gets close to Apple styling for more bang for the buck anyways. But for me, I kinda wish to get a decent laptop that could cope with work loads a little better, for reasonable cost, and not look like a brick (e.g. Dell Lattitudes). Thats' still not really happening. Reply
Silma - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkI almost purchased Acer's Aspire S7 but I didn't in the end because of the following shortcomings which are often shared by all PC manufacturers:
- Acer, who do you think you are, mutilating the keyboard for no good reason?
- Battery. I would prefer a 1 or 2mm thicker Ultrabook any day for a (replaceable) decently sized battery, e.g. 70 Wh or more.
- Cooling and noise. Please add value, don't be an assembler and work harder on cooling and noise. Most owner reviews complain about both.
- Soldered memory. If you absolutely want to solder memory instead of making it upgradable, then you need to offer 8 GB at the very least, especially at this super premium price. Even better offer an Ultrabook with upgradable memory.
- Non replaceable SSD. Again, for a super-premium laptop, one should expect at least 3 years of usage, which means upgrading the SSD down the road.
It is really a shame as the following points made the Aspire S7 extremely endearing:
- Kudos for the choice of a touch-enabled, full HD and IPS panel, which makes this screen 3x better than most offering (hall of shame: Lenovo X1 Carbon super crappy screen at $1.5k +)
- Kudos for the aesthetic. It won't please all people, but at least it went further than most manufacturers
- Kudos for the very decent computing power. Reply
DanNeely - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkI've seen speculation elsewhere that it's the touchscreen that are responsible for the poorer battery life seen in w8 laptops vs their w7 ancestors; but I haven't seen anyone try to confirm this by disabling it and rerunning any of the battery tests. Reply
CadentOrange - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkWe've established that they're gunning for Macbook air prices, but other than that is it really comparable?
How does the keyboard feel? I've seen the keyboard panned in the Ars review, and I tend to agree with them. If I'm spending $1500 on a laptop, I'd like a keyboard that doesn't feel clobbered together. Where are the function keys? Why is there no space between the "\" key and "Enter"? Does that annoy in practice?
The battery life is abysmal. If you're going to charge as much as an Air, you really should perform like an Air. I'm no Apple fanboy, I have a 2nd hand Macbook and all my other PCs and server run Linux. It's in my interest that PC manufacturers produce products that rival Apple's. This is sadly not even close. Reply
KPOM - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkCompared to the 13.3" MacBook Air with 256GB, which retails for $1499 with the 1.8GHz i5 and $1599 with 2.0GHz i7, the Asus has a better display (1920x1080 IPS touchscreen vs 1440x900 TFT non-touch), a processor that splits the difference, and lighter weight. Battery life is a bit disappointing, but overall it looks like a competitive package. The challenge is that PC buyers aren't used to paying these kinds of prices. The quality appears to be there (though the keyboard discussion is a bit worrying). Reply
ananduser - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkThe machine reviewed is an Acer not an Asus. Reply
Death666Angel - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkThose are the things I would like to see. I don't want RAID 0, the battery needs to be bigger for me (and I don't care that much about height, so make it 2cm and double the capacity or something) and 4GB of RAM are a joke in this day and age. The rest looks fine enough. :) Reply
Tech-Curious - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkYeah, the RAID and the RAM are the dealbreakers for me -- and perhaps amusingly, those are the two cheapest things to fix. Switch off RAID and instantly the value proposition of the storage system is doubled. As for the memory, yeah; my old Clevo laptop's 4GB of RAM was impressive back in early 2008. Now, not so much. C'mon Acer, spring for 8GB.
Those two changes represent maybe $30 of extra cost in parts, but they'd increase the perceived value of the whole product by $200-300, IMO, and maybe more to the general consumer.
I wonder how much money Acer would save by swapping out the touch screen. :) Reply
Death666Angel - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkI would like to meat the person who made those 2 decisions and get their explanation for it. With graphics cards, companies/marketing brag about 3GB on a GT630 or something, but with many Ultrabooks, they don't deliver even though the added cost is likely to be very low.
Also, the missing F-Keys is not very nice. I don't use them super frequently, but they do add to my productivity in certain scenarios and it looks like they would have fitted on the laptop easily.
And lastly, I just ran Kraken on my desktop PC (i7 860 which is quite old by PC standards): 2515.1ms +/- 2.7%... didn't expect that much to be honest. :) Reply
Death666Angel - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkAnd my Galaxy Nexus manages 25,728.6ms /+-11.9%. That is strange. Reply
cknobman - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkHard to sell at such a high price when your competitors sell comparable (or better) items $500+ cheaper.
The Asus UX31A is one of my favorites right now. 1080p touch screen, all aluminum build, core i5, 128gb SSD and
I am toying with getting this right now from best buy: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Asus+-+Ultrabook+13.3%... Reply
Zanegray - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkI have a ux31a-ab71 (same as db71 except a smaller ssd) and I LOVE the thing. I don't care for Windows so I put Linux on it and find it my favorite computing device. Under my usage the battery also last for 2 to 3 days at a time. It is snappier than I ever expected and the aluminum case is awesome looking.
To summarize... It's just plain sexy.
Paid just over 1000 dollars for it on black Friday too :-) Reply
ironargonaut - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkIs an IPS screen that fantastic on a 14in laptop that I should pay $700 more? Reply
kyuu - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkYou're not paying $700 for the IPS screen. Reply
drjacko - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkOriginal: "I can't understate how impressively thin this thing is"
But the article is very good as a review as well as a commentary of the path taken by Acer.
Would you have considered a side by side shots against MB counterparts and previous version of Acer's ultrabook? Reply
rarson - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkFor the life of me, I can't understand why someone would want one of these over a normal laptop. Am I the only person who cannot stand ultra-thin (and ultra-flimsy) notebooks? I feel like I'm going to break the thing just by opening it up. A crappy keyboard, touchscreen, and absurd pricing makes this about as useful as a Surface tablet. Which is to say, pretty f#&@ing useless.
Even if you do like the ultra-thin junk, I still don't see why you'd want to pay such a premium for a touchscreen on a laptop, although I suppose when your keyboard is that crappy, you'll be yearning for some other kind of input device.
If I want a consumption device, I'll buy a Nexus tablet or similar. If I want a computing device, then I'll buy a regular laptop. For the price of one of these, I could buy one of each and STILL save a chunk of change. Reply
kyuu - Monday, January 07, 2013 - link1) These devices are not "ultra-flimsy", despite being very thin. If you "feel" like you're going to break it, that's your problem. You remind me of my grandmother arguing that you have to drive a gigantic Oldmobile or an SUV to be safe because smaller cars don't "seem" like they could be as safe.
2) If you don't see the value proposition in a device like this, then obviously it's not for you. I don't see the value proposition in buying a Mercedes, for example, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be built. Reply
Tech-Curious - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkTo be fair, your grandmother is right: all else being equal, a lighter car is less safe, possibly a lot less safe depending on the particulars. Reply
AnnoyedGrunt - Tuesday, January 08, 2013 - linkExcept that all else isn't equal, is it? Cars today are much, much safer than they have ever been, and even a small, modern car would be much safer than Granny's Oldsmobile.
As far as the ultra-thin laptops go, I'm not a huge fan, but I can understand how someone who travels would really like the smaller, more portable size. My wife has a Macbook Pro 15 (non-retina), and I have a Dell Precision M4600 for work, and those are reasonable sizes for me.
This Acer is interesting, very similar in cost to a Macbook Air, but with better specs in most areas. However, one thing the Macs have done MUCH better than Windows laptops is make the touchpad useful. I don't know if it's a combination of OSX and hardware, or better drivers, or what, but it is so much easier to use the touchpad on my wife's Macbook than the one on my Dell (and any other Windows laptop I've used). I don't feel the need to use a mouse on the Mac, but on the Dell I always feel handcuffed without it (and this is for things like MS Office, web browsing, etc.).
I would have liked to see some Macbook Air battery life results and performance results, since I feel that is one of the biggest competitors for the Acer.
Ovreall I'm happy to see some in the PC industry making products that move in the direction of quality rather than price. Once you get to the point where the price isn't as much of an issue (especially for something you'll be using for 4-5 years) the enjoyment of using something that has high-quality interface points (monitor, keyboard, etc.) quickly overcomes the cost difference. Still would prefer something a bit thicker with a better keyboard and more battery life, though.
-AG Reply
Tech-Curious - Tuesday, January 08, 2013 - linkAs to your first comment, I don't know that that's universally true. Sure, in general, a modern car will have safety advantages an older car doesn't -- but size does matter: Is a 2013 Smart Car as safe as granny's Oldsmobile? Not a chance. All the airbags in the world can't compensate for the loss of mass.
Even today, there are significant differences in mass within the same class of car. So if you have a choice between otherwise analogous vehicles, choosing the heavier one is (generally) safer.
The heavier option is probably also less fuel efficient, though, so like everything else, it's a trade-off.
As to the rest, I have to agree. Reply
rarson - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - linkFirst of all, it depends on the type of accident. I can guarantee you that a head-on collision with a wall at, say, 30 mph will be safer in a Smart Car than an Oldsmobrick.
The fact of the matter is that when it comes to protecting the passenger, crumple zones and safety cages are more important than mass. Today's cars are designed to absorb the energy of the crash, to soften the impact on the passenger. Older cars were designed with the mentality that if the car survived mostly unscathed, then the passenger would as well, which is obviously incorrect. If safety is your primary concern, then you're better off looking at crash testing than vehicle size or weight. But the absolute best way to increase your safety is to become a better driver. Reply
Tech-Curious - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - link
I can guarantee you that a head-on collision with a wall at, say, 30 mph will be safer in a Smart Car than an Oldsmobrick.
The fact of the matter is that when it comes to protecting the passenger, crumple zones and safety cages are more important than mass.
It's a matter of mass and size. Your guarantee is preposterous, because a Smart Car has precious little space within which to crumple, without also crumpling the people inside of it. The size of the wheelbase, the cabin, and yes, the mass of the vehicle are all important.
I've been in a head-on collision in a compact car with a much heavier object (a semi-truck). Trust me when I say that I'm lucky to be alive; if I hadn't swerved at the last second, I would have been vaporized, because the truck literally drove through the right side of my engine compartment, and didn't come to rest until its front bumper was sitting on my passenger seat.
Thank god no one was sitting there. The truck's damage? A cracked headlight.
Now, if I had been involved in the same accident in an Oldsmobrick, as you call it, the car would much more likely have kept something approaching its original shape. A passenger or I could have died from the internal trauma caused by the savage stop; that's true -- but the passenger would have died in more-or-less one piece.
Let's not kid ourselves: The Smart Car is little more than a roofed motorcycle, for all the protection it offers your body. Many modern cars are safer than their (often heavier) ancestors, but I chose the Smart Car because it represents an extreme, and I thought (erroneously, as it happens) that the extreme example would illustrate the point without courting controversy.
And yes, good driving habits comprise the best safety measure available -- but it's a mistake to assume that you're ever 100% in control of any situation on the road. The essence of safe driving is to understand that you don't have that control, to minimize your risk by putting yourself into the best position to react to sudden hazards. Even so, not all hazards are avoidable. Reply
Tech-Curious - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - linkOh, and with regard to crash testing, you have to be very careful. Tested safety ratings might rule out weight and size: for instance, the Smart Car recently got a safety rating similar to the Trailblazer's -- but you'd have to be out of your mind to conclude that both vehicles are equally safe.
The Trailblazer is simply at the same level, relative to its analogues, as a Smart Car. A couple of statements from (or paraphrases of) the president of the Insurance Institute from Highway Safety follow:
"All things being equal in safety, bigger and heavier is always better. But among the smallest cars, the engineers of the Smart did their homework and designed a high level of safety into a very small package," Lund said.
(From http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24599768/ns/business-a...
In new crash tests, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rammed three automakers' smallest cars into their midsize models. Although the small cars had passed other IIHS tests, they flunked in collisions with larger but still-fuel-efficient sedans. "The safety trade-offs are clear," IIHS President Adrian Lund says. "There are healthier ways to save gas."(from http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/autos/2009-04...
"We're hearing people say, 'Everything gets a 'good' rating now, so I might as well buy a small car,' " Lund says. "A lot of people are forgetting that the laws of physics still hold" and even a little bit bigger still is safer.(from http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/autos/2009-04...
And finally, the tale in pictures. Trailblazer: http://media.caranddriver.com/images/media/191279/...
Smart Car: http://node1.ecogeek-cdn.net/ecogeek/images/storie... Reply
rarson - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - link"Once you get to the point where the price isn't as much of an issue (especially for something you'll be using for 4-5 years) the enjoyment of using something that has high-quality interface points (monitor, keyboard, etc.) quickly overcomes the cost difference."
In that case, the Acer (and the Macbook Air) fail completely. I've got a $350 Trinity laptop that I'm using right now that has a much better keyboard than both of these, and even my old PII Compaq laptop is DRASTICALLY better. I understand what you're saying about touchpads (the laptop I'm using definitely has some quirks that can make the touchpad frustrating), but I find it laughable when people call these devices "high quality" when they have such terrible keyboards. Reply
rarson - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - link1) Uh, every device that I've tried feels fragile in my hands due to the actual thickness, not the construction or materials. That's why I said I "feel" like I'm going to break the thing.
2) Well that's just absurd. Anyone can easily see the value of a Mercedes. You can't tell the difference between a car with solid body construction and quality sound deadening? It's a pretty marked difference between, say, a typical economy car. You don't seem to understand the difference between seeing the value and actually desiring it.
There's no exceptional build quality here. The device isn't going to last longer or significantly outperform a comparably equipped, but much cheaper laptop. All you're getting is a decent display (with the added cost of touch), a slimmer chassis, and an unjustifiably higher price. So where exactly is the value proposition here? Reply
The0ne - Monday, January 07, 2013 - linkThis is an Ultrabook laptop. These are usually not cheap to begin with because they are Ultrabooks. Why are people comparing these to notebooks that are not even in the same class? These are not even in the same class as business notebooks as well. Subjectively, these are expensive because they are light and thin. Most of the readers here won't even consider buying one to be honest or may have never own an ultrabook before. The market for these are business travelers where they need the light weight and thinness to carry it around for long periods of time.
I just don't understand why people would complain about something that they don't begin to comprehend what it is and what market it is aimed at. Reply
rarson - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - linkYou're right, I don't comprehend what market these are aimed at, since a regular laptop is only about a pound heavier than this thing, and might actually offer a decent keyboard and slightly larger screen real estate, things that I'm pretty sure would be far more important to the average businessman than "thin and light," at a significantly lower price, no less.
Perhaps you could explain to me why a businessman would need a touchscreen on a laptop, or 1080p resolution in a 13" screen.
You said it above: "These are usually not cheap to begin with because they are Ultrabooks." Right, they are'nt cheap because they're marketed as expensive devices. I'm sure it costs more money to make the thinner, lighter chassis. But that doesn't mean that it makes sense to pay more for it. Reply
jabber - Monday, January 07, 2013 - link.....did we get a indication of what this machine is like out of the box?
In other words -
1. How long did it take from first switch on till actually being able to use it properly?
2. How much crapware was installed and how long did it take to uninstall?
I have known Acer laptops (and others from similar companies) to take a couple of hours messing around till you can actually use them. I love the ones that force you to burn a set of recovery disks at start up and threaten thats its a once in a lifetime deal. Reply
bobjones32 - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - linkI posted elsewhere in this thread with my impressions, but my wife purchased this from a Microsoft Store. That means it comes with a Signature image, so no bloatware, and ready to use straight out of the box.
The thing turned on instantly, set up quickly, and she was using it fully within just a few minutes. Reply
thesavvymage - Tuesday, January 08, 2013 - linkI seriously do not understand on having the "thinnest" laptop you can have. You dont hold it in your hands, it sits on your lap. The screen size and overall volume are what matters the most (for bulk). This laptop is .5" thick. If they even increased it to .7", they couldve added a bigger batter and better cooling, and it wouldnt even seem that different to anyone without a milimeter caliper. Reply
blue_urban_sky - Tuesday, January 08, 2013 - linkWhy stop there, make it an even 1" then you could have 2 memory slots and a removable hard drive. Or even better make it 1.5" and have a huge removable battery, an optical drive and a dedicated GPU! No make it 2" and 17" screen then you can have a full sized keyboard top of the range graphics high end CPU tons of storage and neon lights on the top of the shiny plastic case!!1!
Not really aimed at you, just all the people who like there £300 lappy and can not possibly imagine a world where other people want different things. Reply
thesavvymage - Tuesday, January 08, 2013 - linkyou totally did not comprehend what i meant Reply
blue_urban_sky - Wednesday, January 09, 2013 - linkYou can't see the point of making the thinest laptop.
You think they should have made it fatter and increased the stats.
You justify this by saying people could not tell the difference without a ruler.
You fail to understand that increasing the height from 0.5"->0.7" is a 40% increase in volume where "overall volume are what matters the most" . Reply
rarson - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - linkYou completely failed to grasp his point. Making the thinnest laptop possible doesn't make any sense if it adds too much to the price. If it compromises too many variables, then it's obviously more logical to make a slightly thicker device. All you're doing is reconstructing his statements into a straw man. You're also using percentages to make your argument sound stronger, but nobody cares about percentages. We're talking about actual thickness here. You know, real world stuff. Nice try. Reply
blue_urban_sky - Friday, January 11, 2013 - linkJoy the straw man miss used again. They were to illustrate that I understood their position thus arguing against "you totally did not comprehend what i meant".
Shall we dissect your truism :-
"Making the thinnest laptop possible doesn't make any sense if it adds too much to the price"
Is that too much according to you or is it a standardised figure? So your argument can be read as
"Making the thinnest laptop possible makes sense if it doesn't add too much to the price"
"If it compromises too many variables, then it's obviously more logical to make a slightly thicker device."
Compromises on variables that you hold above others. So this could be rearranged to
"If it doesn't compromise too many variables, then it's obviously more logical to make a thinner device."
"but nobody cares about percentages. We're talking about actual thickness here. You know, real world stuff."
I commend that you went to the trouble of asking everyone (out of interest did you insult them as well?). Ahh I didn't realise we were talking about 'actual' thickness!
You're also using 'actual' to make your argument sound stronger (sry couldn't resist).
The real world works by iterative development things happen in small increments. Reply
rarson - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - linkI'd even argue ergonomics are now more important than overall bulk. Modern laptops just aren't that thick or heavy anymore, so I don't understand why some people are claiming that a pound here or a half-inch there are worth the ridiculous price premium. I also don't understand what a touchscreen has to do with being light and thin, but I digress.
I realized how much I appreciate the 15" size when I tried using an 11" netbook for an extended period of time. The keyboard was just far too cramped. 10 inches might be a good size for a tablet, but when I want keys, I'd rather give up some size and thickness for better keys and room for my hands to be comfortable. Having the extra screen space of a slightly larger chassis is a bonus, and coming from an 11" chassis, there's no comparison.
I've got an old PII laptop that until recently I would occasionally use. That thing probably weighs about 9 or 10 pounds. It's nicely built, and even has a matte screen, but it does get heavy to hold. I can't help but think that the 5-and-a-half pound notebook I'm using right now is pretty darn light. It's lighter than the 6-lb bowling ball I used to throw when I was 8. It's also got a bigger screen and a much nicer keyboard than this Acer, and cost about a fourth of the price.
Clearly, these ultrabooks are toys for suckers who think their social status depends on what kind of gadgets they own. Reply
Tech-Curious - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - linkAgreed. Well said. Reply
blue_urban_sky - Friday, January 11, 2013 - link*sigh* You were doing well right up to your last paragraph.
B- Reply
dszc - Wednesday, January 09, 2013 - linkJarred,
Thanks for your review. And special extra thanks for emphasizing productivity features and ergonomics for people who actually work.
I am a professional photographer and full-time businessman. I live in Photoshop, Excel, Word, eMail, and web research. That is what I must do and what I enjoy doing. I never play games.
Your comments on the action and utility of the keyboard and its layout are crucial. Also the touchpad. The keyboard and its shortcuts, along with the touchpad is where most true workers live. We can get things done 10x faster with these interfaces than with a touchscreen.
Thank you for continuing to harp on these issues, as they are critical. Yes, a pretty face is nice to look at, but the real beauty of a computer is in its function.
As for price, I am by no means rich, but I am more than willing to pay for an excellent productivity tool. If a laptop must cost $1100 or 1200 or 1300 to have essential features such as a decent IPS panel and a decent backlit keyboard and a decent touchpad, then so be it. But if you take away the backlit keyboard to save $20 or $50 or whatever, then the laptop to me becomes useless.
There are tons of functionally compromised laptops for the masses that are hobbled by pricepoint. But it is not right to reduce those of us who must work for a living to the lowest common denominator.
Kudos to Acer for stepping up with an IPS screen. I would be MORE than willing to pay $1300 for this tool if Acer had bothered to get the little things right - excellent backlit keyboard with great layout; fantastic (rather than mediocre) touchpad; decently calibrated IPS panel. And I'd much rather pay $1400-$1500 to have these things RIGHT, than $1200-$1300 and have them not quite right.
Thanks again, Jarred, for your great reviews.
Thanks, Acer, for moving in the right direction. Please don't stop short of the goal. Reply
bobjones32 - Thursday, January 10, 2013 - linkI'm a huge tech dork as you'd expect considering I'm reading AnandTech. So when my wife decided to get this laptop, I gave her a quick Windows 8 tutorial as if I was teaching an alternate version of myself how to use it.
"Just click the desktop"
"Just use the trackpad, why use touch?"
"You can mostly ignore the Metro stuff, that's just meant for tablets"
Cut to my surprise when she basically ignores all that advice, and absolutely falls in love with the laptop using touch almost all the time, sticking in Metro apps almost all the time, and barely ever seeing the Desktop.
When the laptop is sitting on a desk, she's always resting on her elbows anyway, so reaching toward the screen is natural. When the laptop is sitting on her lap, her thumbs are right there at the screen, so it's perfectly natural to reach out and touch it. Metro apps meet most of her needs for web browsing, playing games, and chatting with friends, so she really only uses the Desktop for Office.
The keyboard is a bit annoying to her, but everything else about the laptop is nearly perfect. Even the battery life, considering that she's coming from a Vista-era laptop from 5-6 years ago that was upgraded to Windows 7.
After observing her learn to use Windows 8 and eventually fall in love with it and this laptop, it really made me rethink my expectations for the OS in general. Maybe the tech press has it wrong because they're approaching it from expectations that normal people simply don't care about? Reply
brtl - Saturday, January 12, 2013 - linkDoes a regular single mSATA SSD drive, such as the Crucial M4 mSATA SSD 256GB, work in the Acer S7 series? Has anybody tried this? Thanks - Bert Reply
brtl - Monday, January 28, 2013 - linkTo answer my own question (maybe it will help someone at some point): yes it works fine. After replacing the OEM drive the firmware won't report any Intel RAID controller anymore, so I'm suspecting the RAID controller and firmware for the OEM SSD are actually on the mSATA board. Reply
Roy333 - Tuesday, February 12, 2013 - linkI bought the Acer Aspire S7 from the Microsoft store in Toronto, after using for a week I realized that the internal battery only lasted betewen 3 to 4 hours, I went back to the Microsoft store to buy the external add-on battery pack, I was told they do not carry any Acer products other than the laptops, they told me to buy it on Acers web site.
That is when I went into Acers spin cycle. The Canadian web site does not carry it, the American web site will not ship to Canada. The emails I sent to Acer asking about the external battery add-on came back telling me that that battery was still under warranty & to send my laptop in to be repaired. I called them up in the USA & was told they can not ship to Canada, but to call their tech number & they could sell me the battery & ship it to Canada. After 45 minutes talking to Daisy in tech support I was told she can not ship to Canada. I then went to Acer Canada's head office, where they gave me a 1-800 number to call, it was some authorized company in Canada & he said he would ask Acer in Texas if they had the battery, I never heard back from him. The moral of the story is I should have bought a Mac Book Reply
Amit kumar - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 - linkWow the device wonderful, truthfully I have belief in your review. It's have a great features. I got its full specification on this site as well. http://www.gadtecho.com/ Reply


text:
The SSD Diaries: Crucial's RealSSD C300by Anand Lal Shimpi on 7/13/2010 12:39 AM EST
51 Comments
Back to Article
fgmg2 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkI know that I could flip back and forth between the various charts to calculate the performance per a watt, but it be great to get a consolidated chart that graphed the drives based upon write (read?) performance per a watt.
Additionally analyzing drives purely based upon their write/read performance and/or purely based upon their power consumption seems a bit meaningless. It should be very easy to make a drive consumes almost no power but writes slower than a 3 1/2" floppy. Especially as you see some drives perform more than twice as fast as others.
Just a suggestion.
P.S. It might not be a bad idea to do the same for your other reviews, such as video cards and CPUs. Reply
7Enigma - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkAgreed. In most reviews (video cards for example) performance per watt is somewhat less important as normally you'll be modeling or gaming and the power draw is going to be pretty stable.
But for a hard drive, especially when many of these will be notebook replacements, it is very important. I have an Intel G2 80GB and love it, and when I look at the power consumption numbers it looks better than the C300. But I'm not naive to the fact that (when TRIM'd) the C300 crushes the G2 in pretty much every benchmark. What that tells me is that in a real-world result the C300 would use more power but get the job done in a shorter time and since we aren't spinning up a traditional platter, the HD behaves very much like a modern Intel CPU and would go idle.
That hurry up and get idle I think would skew those power consumption charts heavily.
What I would design would be a benchmark that has a set instruction set (write 2GB of random, 2 GB of sequential, read 10GB of data), and then measure the TOTAL power of the drive consumed during that time. Then report that total power number and use it for future reviews (a static number to rank similar to a PCMark or Vantage score) Reply
Ernestds - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkI think the best way to calculate efficiency is measuring the total energy used by the drive doing the "Typical Workload" test. Of course, if Anand could do the same with the "Heavy Downloading Workload" it would be great. IMO there is no need for the "Gaming Workload" though, usually who looks for the power graphs is aiming the improvness(does this word exist?) of a notebook's battery life, and frequently who cares about that, do not game on battery.
Just a question to Anand, do you feel difference between two SSDs, say the Nova one and the Crucial?
Keep on the great work! Reply
MrSpadge - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkIt's kind of funny to see someone asking for power efficiency for something which is probably the most power efficient thing in the entire PC, especially if you compare it to HDDs. I understand it's interesting and maybe even important for laptops, though.
I'd rather be interested in more detailed power draw and/or efficiency analysis in case where the power draw really hurts: GPUs and to a lesser extent CPU. For example: how does the power draw of a GF100 improve under load if you watercool it? Sure, not very relevant for most users.. but the difference should be surprisingly large. Reply
shin0bi272 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkIf you want best overall performance go sandforce. The only real large advantage the crucial drive had was in read performance. sysmark et al were within a few hundred points of one another. So the overall feel of the system will be identical till you either do some heavy read ops or conversely you fill the drive and dont trim it. With the prices being about the same for the 100 vs 128 the better performer is the sandforce drives. Reply
Techdad - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkReally? You'd take the performance tricks and the risk of real data that doesn't fit SandFarce's fancy algorithms over the straight honest performance of the Crucial drive? That's odd.
I've had my Crucial drive since it came out and it's been great. In spite of Anand's corner-case bashing the first version firmware has been rock solid. Debating even if I want to bother with the firmware upgrade, but I'll probably do it. Reply
bji - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkRelying on TRIM and optimizing for the least stressful case is also a "performance trick", so your implication that Sandforce uses such tricks and Micron does not is wrong. Also your childish pun on the Sandforce name shows alot about where you are coming from.
The Sandforce and the Micron drives look to have very similar performance in the vast majority of cases, so shin0bi272 is spot-on. And the increased cost of the Crucial drive would seem to be the deciding factor for me.
But you can't go wrong with either offering it would seem, so pick whichever you like best. As for myself, I would pick Sandforce, only because of my extreme aversion to any chance of degraded drive performance, having been bitten by stuttering of early drives. Not saying that the Crucial drive is anything like a JMicron, but I personally value the resiliency of the Sandforce controller very highly, and would pay some peak performance cost happily for the guarantee of better worst-case performance.
Not everyone will, or should, have the same opinion on this; those less averse to the risks of worst-case performance degredation would be well served by the Crucial drive. Reply
hotlips69 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkHaving read this review, I'm considering buying one of the 100GB "OCZ Vertex 2" drives used in this article, but I'm not sure exactly which is the correct drive model as there seem to be numerous "Vertex 2" drives on the OCZ website!!
Is it the Pro Series or EX Series or just the standard Vertex 2 series??? Reply
hotlips69 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - link....also, why is it listed as 120GB in the chart on page 1 of the article? Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkA standard Vertex 2 120GB drive is all you need. The 100GB capacities will probably be phased out by most SandForce partners over time as there's no tangible performance benefit for desktop workloads.
I just used the 100GB data we had in the engine which is why it appears as such in the charts.
Take care,
Anand Reply
Breit - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkThere are 4 different Vertex 2 drives from OCZ as i know:
-> the standard Vertex 2, which uses MLC flash and has ~13% overprovisioning (~91GB usable capacity for the 100/128GB model)
-> then there is a Vertex 2e, which is the same as the normal Vertex 2, but with a modified firmware for ~7% overprovisioning (~111GB usable capacity for the 100/128GB model)
-> then there is a Vertex 2 pro, wich also uses MLC flash and also has ~13% overprovisioning, but also has a supercap to help out on a sudden power loss (more like an enterprise feature)
-> and an last there is the Vertex 2 EX: this drive uses SLC flash and therefor is way to expensive for normal desktop use
the first 3 should perform nearly identical. the last is supposed to be quite superior in performance, but i havn't seen any reliable performance numbers as of yet - anand? ;). Reply
hotlips69 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkThx for the info!
Why would anyone buy the Vertex 2 "standard" over the Vertex "2e" if it performs the same, but has a larger usuable capacity?
Would there not be a performance hit if there is only 7% provisioning compared to 13% if the drive got full??? Reply
DanNeely - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkIn normal desktop use there's no reason to get the standard drive. Sandforce initially designed its controllers for the enterprise market and servers can be much more brutal on a drive than end user computers are. On a server workload the extra scratch space was useful, but when they moved over to consumer drives it had no benefit. The 2e was released with an updated firmware once it became clear the controller was just wasting space. Reply
jedighost - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkLet me answer: there will be OCZ 'Vertex 2' firmware updates coming out that will allow you to "switch" between 100GB and 120GB on the same drive. So far no significant performance difference have been found, but time is an interesting factor here, noone had months or years to test it, and users who visit forums and write their experiences are usually not known for torturing their SSDs 24/7 just to see what happens/kill them/wear them out.
Based on the data available at the OCZ Support Forums, grab the 100GB or 120GB version, whichever you can cheaper, and later on you will be able to choose how much provisioning you want, 7 or 13%.
When your 120GB Vertex 2 SSD is full and you write 8GBs of data (7% of 128GB) in a short period, yes, then there can be degradation. But how likely is that, really?
Also, in average, you can write an MLC cell 10,000 times before you wear it out. This means, to evenly wear out all the cells of your Vertex 2, you need to write 10,000x120GB=1200 TERABYTES on your drive. Sure, when you only write a smaller than 4KB file, the whole cell has to be rewritten, but still, as a system drive, which is not supposed to contain huge files, in the size of several Gigs (raided Raptors are for that), when will you write 1000 Terabytes? By that time, your SSD is long outdated, because 10 years passed by.
More concretely: if you write 275 GBs EVERYday to your SSD for 10 years, 365 days a year, then you wrote 1000 TBs. Lets say i didn't calculate with a bunch of factors, and I am wrong to 3:1 degree and your drives wears out in 200TBs, that is 100GBs a day for 10 years. When will you "rewrite" the whole size of your SSD in daily usage?
Catch my drift?
Buy your drive and don't worry, just enjoy it, the same as I did. Have regular backups as this is still new technology, but be ready to be blown away if this is going to be your first SSD - you will realize that it was not stronger CPUs and overclocking that was needed to make a system snappy, but eliminating the most-overlooked bottleneck: the old HDD. Reply
jedighost - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkActually i made a quick calculation: assuming you can write with 100MB/sec to your Vertex 2 continuously, 24/7, it would still take *120 days* to wear out all the cells, writing to them 10,000 times each. No mortal user had the time to try this yet. :)) Reply
sor - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - linkFYI, in December '09 Micron announced that their MLC write durability increased significantly. Anything that has their 34nm chips (C300, maybe others) will have much better durability than your figures. Reply
Drazick - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkIt seems the smart move would be waiting for the next generation of SSD's by Intel.
Assuming it would be a SATA 3 drives paired with P65 it should beat anything on the table at the moment. Reply
Jonathan Dum - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkNot to mention 25nm NAND from Intel/Micron... longest wait ever. Though I wonder when all the other guys like OCZ will get 25nm? Reply
james.jwb - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkAnand, what are your recommendations for around the 60-80GB mark? Any changes from your conclusion above? Reply
Phate-13 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkI will say it again, and keep saying it till it happens. Most people are not interested in 100-300GB SSD (except for lower prices obviously) or in 30-40GB SSD's. It's the 50-80GB ones that most people are interested in. That's about the sweet spot of capacity that is needed.
The Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB is x times more interesting then it's bigger brothers, it's much cheaper, not only in absolute terms, but also in capacity/euro. And by far the best buy atm in my eyes.
The line-up I want to see would be about something like this:
- Kingston V-series S2 64GB
- Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 64GB
- Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB
- OCZ Solid II 60GB
- OCZ Onyx 64GB
- OCZ Agility 2 60GB
- OCZ Vertex 2 60GB
- Corsair Force 60GB
And perhaps some of the other, cheaper Corsair SSD's. Reply
strikeback03 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkReally? I have 3 computers, and can see a use for the 30-40GB, 60-80GB, and 100+GB size drives depending on which system I am thinking of. For my HTPC, a small drive would be fine, all it holds is the OS. For my desktop, I have an 80GB X25G2, as IMO a smaller drive would be iffy when 2 operating systems are installed on the drive, and allowing for extra spare area. For my laptop I wouldn't consider anything under 100GB, as I don't want to have to carry a separate external drive to store stuff to. Reply
erple2 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkI'll second that - my laptop has the 160 gig Intel G2 drive in it because I have installed slightly more than the OS on it (a few steam games + WoW = need more than 80 gig).
I don't need more than about 120-160 gigs on my laptop (that's what my home server is for). My desktop would be in the same boat - I'd need enough "space" to install some large applications on it plus the OS.
I've heard people recommend that you should install applications on spindle drives, but the reality is that some of those applications are very slow loading on a spindle drive.
Personally, I don't care if my OS takes 5 minutes to boot. I almost never shut down anyway. Reply
neoflux - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkFantastic article as always, Anand. Informative, investigative, and conclusive. I couldn't ask for anything else ( other than the funds to purchase a Vertex 2 :P ). Reply
Slaimus - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkWith such a large DRAM cache, is there greater risk of data corruption when there is a power outage or power supply failure? Reply
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkCrucial claims to store very little user data in the external DRAM, it's mostly to give the firmware room to store mapping tables and history data to make better decisions about how to organize future writes.
Take care,
Anand Reply
GourdFreeMan - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkHave you ever actually put this to the test, though?
Intel claims they do the exact same thing with their DRAM, yet I have had applications that were not in use become corrupt after a sudden power loss (i.e. bluescreen after resuming from hibernation, cat depressing laptop power button) on my Intel G2 drives. The mechanical drives that were in the exact same system prior to being replaced by SSDs only lost minimal amounts of data (and typically only the data in use at the time) under the exact same power loss scenarios. Reply
Echo147 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkMy first SSD - And it couldn't be picked up after just 5 hours. Pretty crushed :s
It'd been shipped with Firmware 0001 which I'm guessing was a large oversight by Crucial or the retailer. I wasn't about to go flashing a £500 drive, so it's in RMA as we speak.
Will be waiting for Intel's 25nm offerings before dipping my burned toes again... Reply
greggm2000 - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkAnand,
Are there any plans to test these drives in RAID configuration? You've already done so with Intel's cheapest value drive, but for those of us who are considering in the higher end drives, it would be interesting to know such things as will a pair of Crucial RealSSD 128GB drives on SATA outperform a single 256GB on SATA 6Gb... or even how well 4 of the 64GB drives compare as well. Also, how do the Sandforce drives compare in RAID to the others.
Thanks! Great article as always! Reply
mckirkus - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkJust to get a sense of what is used by most humans (hard drives, not VRaptors). Reply
Alkapwn - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkDo SandForce controllers suffer when BitLocker is enabled? I'm guessing there would be less predictable data patterns for it's controller to use, and thus might be slower? Would that then solidly put the lead in Crucials favor? Reply
Breit - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - linkyes, a sandforce drive should be slower in general when used with third party encryption as all data seems random to the drive then and the compression algorithms have nothing to compress. i'm not sure if the sf1200 controller can, but the sf1500 controller definitely can encrypt the data on the drive by themself storing it in an aes-128 encrypted format.
quote from the sandforce site:
"DuraClass technology automatically stores data in a secure, AES-128 encrypted format. This also prevents would-be thieves from extracting data directly from the flash memory should they ever have access to the drive."
question is how good or usable their implementation is?! :) Reply
sparkuss - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkI asked this question in a previous review and once again you note your "using the Marvell 88SE9128 controller similar to many motherboards".
Did you only use the WIN7 MSAHCI and INTEL IMSM 8.9 on both the onboard SATA2 and Rocket 620?
This is of interest to many on the Crucial boards concerning the lack of TRIM support in Marvell drivers for their 9123/9128 controllers. Reply
mattgmann - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linklast year the ssd market was pretty cut and clear with what was good and what wasn't. There have been a lot of advances recently, and it's getting hard to keep track of what manufacturers with what controllers work well in what configurations. I'd really love to see an SSD buying guide with all of the current drives, possibly separated into workstation, laptop, and server use sections.
thanks Reply
willscary - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkI just sent my first SSD back to Crucial. I called. They RMA'ed me and will send a replacement ASAP. I am impressed. I have 5 year warranties on the M225 series SSDs, and they never even blinked...send it back and they will replace it.
This was the only M225 that I have installed that does not have 1916 firmware.
My comment is on the prices. If any of you recall, I was the guy who already had bought, installed and used 5 Crucial M225 128GB SSDs when I decided to try Sandforce in the OWC SSD. After I bought the SSD and ON THE DAY IT SHIPPED, OWC changed their website and said that the controllers were Sandforce 1200 and not the 1500 that I was told when I puurchased. It was still a good deal, but I was upset with the bait and switch, so I refused delivery and had it returned.
I then purchased a Crucial M225 for myself, this one the 256GB flavor.
I want to say that I have had no problems. Peak reads reach about 240MB/s and average reads are about 215MB/sec with large files. Writes are less, about 175-180MB/sec for larger files. With small files like Anand uses, my writes are about 125MB/sec and my small file reads are about 145MB/sec.
Very small files read and write much slower, in the 5-25MB/sec range, but those are files that are very small...in the 4-20KB range.
What amazes me is the speed. While 5MB/sec may sound slow, it is not, at least when you consider that these are 4KB files. These small files write and read nearly instantly.
I paid $525 for the drive. I have seen them as low as $509. This is a great price! Now that I have seen the newest article here by Anand, I really understand that my outdated M225 is still a great deal at $525.
I would like to see this drive, or a comparable one, listed in the lineup with these newer drives. While not as fast, I believe them to be a good value when sale priced. I even saw a Western Digital 128GB SSD a few weeks ago for $219 with free shipping. They were gone very quickly! Reply
Makaveli - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkThat was a good read thanks. Reply
pesos - Tuesday, July 13, 2010 - linkHi Anand,
Thanks for the followup review - I have been using a 256gb C300 on each of my Poweredge T710 servers for the last few months with great results.
I am curious - does applying the destructive firmware update restore the drive to peak performance, or should it be coupled with some kind of secure erase?
Wes Reply
elimliau - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - linkHi,
Has anyone made the above work, mine cant?
elimliau Reply
sparkuss - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - linkelimliau,
You need to head over to the Crucial SSD forum. I have seen several threads and posts on that specific card/board.
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD... Reply
sparkuss - Wednesday, July 14, 2010 - linkEDIT: You may have to register to get that link to work, sorry Reply
foo-bar - Friday, July 16, 2010 - linkThis is all very interesting, and new SSDs seems to hit the market constantly. But the differences seems to be mostly software related i.e firmware. What are the bottleneck to get full SATA speed? Is it the NAND flash them selves? And if so, what is on the horizon when it comes to this type of memory? Reply
deardeerlulu - Monday, July 19, 2010 - linkI am kind of confused about the figures shown in that page, what axis X represents? Does it mean how much capacity has been filled? Or anywhere I can find explanations?
If yes, then for crucial drive, why the performance dropped more than 50% just after less than 10GB data is filled? Since from my understanding, if there are only a small percentage capacity is filled, there are still a lot of free space, the random performance should not drop so rapidly?
Anand, or someone else here can explain my confusion? Thanks! Reply
zzing123 - Monday, July 26, 2010 - linkHere's a question. If you have Windows 7 running under BootCamp on a Mac, and have an SSD that's partitioned with 1 partition being the Mac OS X boot drive (HFS+) and the other being the Windows 7 boot drive (NTFS), and finally have an HFS driver like Mediafour's MacDrive to read the HFS+ partition, will TRIM work on that SSD?
Since I know Anand has a couple of Macs, and possibly other readers, can anyone verify this? Reply
SSDInq - Tuesday, July 27, 2010 - linkI've been wondering how this particular scenario would affect the performance of SSD's. I believe that many users fall into this pattern:
- Laptop with smallish HD (same range as SSDs)
- A few months after purchase the drive is ~90% full (Original OS + Crapware, Updates,Office + files, Emails + archives, photos + videos, leftover crap from every app, etc)
At this point, every write request starts hitting the same area (some old data is deleted to free space and new data from emails, browser cache, downloads replaces it).
Will the write leveling algorithms affect the performance of SSDs ? How much? Reply
alexwy - Thursday, July 29, 2010 - linkI am wondering why random read is slower than random write. Write operation is always slower than read, and sequential write is slower than sequential read. Why random read is slower? Is it because that the random read data is not 4K aligned? Reply
sor - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - linkWith small random data, the overhead of looking up where the data is to retrieve it begins to show up, compared to simply identifying an empty spot to store something. This is somewhat related to why TRIM is important, keeps empty/no-longer-used blocks readily available. Reply
Nick932 - Sunday, August 08, 2010 - linkDoes anybody know a laptop that has sata3 controller? Or any other solutions that would accomodate the use of this drive? Reply
deBlanc - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - linkI have two Crucial C300 drives in two different HP laptops. Both have ICH9, Intel GM/PM45 Chipsets. These work fine using the Microsoft AHCI 1.0 driver. If I use the Intel RST 126.96.36.1994 driver, I get BSODs intermittently on boot and almost always waking from sleep. These are known issues reported in several posts on the Crucial C300 forum and also seem to be a problem with the Sandforce drives as discussed on the OCZ forums. If I put an Intel SSD in the laptops, I have no problem with the RST drivers.
So I sent and email to Crucial asking about the problem. I figure there is some type of firmware issue. Here is their response:
Hello - - - - - - - - -,
Thank you for contacting Crucial. It sounds like the C300 drives are functioning properly if you get them to work just fine with the Microsoft drivers. We haven't had any reports of issues with the our SSD and the Intel Rapid Storage driver. We will keep our ears open for similar issues. In the meantime I will refer you to Intel to see if they have had heard of an issue with their driver with our drives.
If you have further questions, please visit the Crucial Community at http://www.crucial.com/help. For sales questions, try our online chat service at http://www.crucial.com/company/contacts.aspx. Our hours are Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (Mountain Time). At Crucial, we are committed to providing high-quality products and reliable service and support.
Technical Support Representative
Tel: (800) 336-8896
Fax: (208) 363-5501
mailto:firstname.lastname@example.com Reply
poohbear - Thursday, October 07, 2010 - linkAnand you really should've mentioned in this review that the AMD AHCI drivers do NOT pass on the TRIM command, so even w/ Win7 this SSD will lose TRIM support w/ the AMD AHCI drivers, and we'll get the abysmal long term performance u highlighted in your TRIM sectino). AMD needs to feel the heat in this regards cause they've been lazy as hell & need to get their stuff together. This is not a problem w/ Intel chipsets, but im really peeved that as of October 2010, there is STILL NO TRIM support from AMD. really pathetic on their part, SSDs are becoming less than $100 & they dont care to implement TRIM support for us. We're stuck using the much less performing MS drivers.
Anandtech really needs to emphasize this, otherwise i never would've bought this drive and went w/ a sandforce based one for its internal garbage collection, but i didnt realize AMD was so behind the times. Reply
sin0822 - Saturday, October 16, 2010 - linkThe degradation you Anand got with the c300 128gb after writes is not reproducible. Even without trim the c300's GC in rev 002 firmware was made extremely aggressive b/c the engineers knew that many people would use the drive without trim. I wanted to contact anand but i do not know how so i am posting here, if proof is needed it will be provided. After seeing results the GC is very aggressive and the drive will stand up to a beating stronger than a sandforce competitor, i was under the impression that this review is correct, but after seeing the results it is evident that those results cannot be reproduced and the write speeds go down only 5-10mb/s from original. Reply
woosh7 - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - linkHi Anand. What really bugs me is that I got EXACTLY the opposite impression of the OCZ Vertex 2, 240GB. :-( In fact all I had to do is one of two simple things. One was to simply copy say 100GB or so of files, like my Flight Simulator X, or Crysis folder, along with 40GB of VMWare files to the hard drive, and my CrystalMark write score would drop. Also the simple act of partitioning the SDD so I had a 32GB OS partition (C:), and the remainder on D:, also helped to bring the read and write speed down on the OCZ when I reloaded an IMAGE backup of my OS. And this is a typical thing a lot of people in the know do. You could do all these things to a standard HDD and not lose anything.
I tried every thing under the sun, including using Paragons align tool, also making sure my drive was reset with the toolbox first etc. Switching to AHCI and back. Nothing helped, except simply letting the Windows 7 DVD make it's partition, and making it ONE BIG 220GB or so partition. And then I only got about 220MB/s read sequential, and 145MB/s write. Random was also ok, but nothing great. Then I loaded a few GB's into this one big partition, and guess what? It too slowed down. It held up longer than my method of loading a cloned image to C:, but It only took me about 20 minutes to bring my drive to figures like 170MB for read, and 110 MB/sec write by transferring only ONE group of files to D: in the "Program Files" folder.
Then out of curiosity I deleted a 20GB folder, then transferred it back to the SSD and this resulted in having 85MB/sec, slow-as-a-cow-on-valium writes. I tried all sorts of things, and nothing short of removing the partition and clearing the drive brought the speed back up to 220MB and 145MB.. I think TRIM was working because I witnessed the scores improve very slightly when I left it over night. Or tried things I had read in forums, or even did "force trim" later on. But the improvements never got me back. I was stuck on 170MB/sec read and 128 or write.
Also this is on an i7 920 at 3.6Ghz, on an Asus board. This is no old or cheap machine! So my test on a clean install of windows 7 was the best, but disappointing as well. My image backups are also of clean installs and should also perform well, but they don't on OCZ.
Now here is where it gets VERY interesting. My first SSD was an barely known PNY 128GB with little support, documentation. It only supports TRIM, and no instructions, nothing on the net really. I beat the living c_rap out of it for 6 weeks. I partitioned it as above, and reloaded many, many cloned images of Windows 7 and Windows XP, over and over on C:. I made folders and deleted them on D:. At the end of 6 weeks, I got the SAME benchmark scores of 240MB/sec Read, and 150MB/sec write. No nonsense. But I had bought the OCZ Because I believed I was stepping up to higher quality and bigger size etc. This taught me that there is something right that PNY did and something very wrong with how OCZ handles their GC or Trim. I've also found reviewers saying the OCZ slows down too easily on Amazon. So again, I'm frustrated because your article is pretty much saying the opposite of what I experienced or expected.
I NEED an SSD that behaves like a REAL HD, except fast of course. Not something that slows down. I need to be able to make partitions and do my experiments etc. So because I know the PNY was fine, I figured it must be OCZ and I just went and ordered a Crucial C300 that isn't here yet. I figured it was a step above the OCZ and because it doesn't rely on sand force. I figured I wouldn't have a boat load of phony benches, along with ATTO with high marks because the data compressed so nicely as it did with the OCZ.
But now I read this article, and it's eluding to the fact that the C300 actually isn't so hot against the OCZ, which is obviously disappointing. The only thing I can hope for is that somehow the C300 won't mind me making a partition for operating system, and another for data. But then again, the OCZ slowed down even on one partition. I mean, who in their right mind is stupid enough to get stuck with 12GB of OS Plus 200GB of programs and data added into the SAME partition 2 years down the line? In the event they need to reload their OS, it makes it a huge task. I surely don't want to continually backup 200GB plus. My system can currently be reloaded in 5 minutes. That's why I do that. I just wish the SSD makers understood that not everyone wants to erase their HD every time and stick in a w7 disc and start all over to get their advertised speeds ( or even less)
And what happens if someone backs up their system (as they should), and then they need to reload it? Then what? Their SSD write scores will fall. I've seen the write speeds go below my green WD HD. I think this is an unacceptable problem that SSD's have and it needs to be resolved. If that Crucial C300 gets here next week and it slows down, you know what? I will return it along with the OCZ and I am going to buy back the PNY I mistakenly returned. Another thing is I am just amazed no one has done a review the PNY. It's not the best, but having an SSD that keeps its speed is worth more to me than anything. On the other hand, I have no clue as to why the PNY did so well, or how it works, and I'm sure it needs more testing. Thanks for the review. Anyway, I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Reply
Thevilpsycho666 - Sunday, February 06, 2011 - linkHi !
After reading Anand reviews on the c300, i was amazed by the performance of the drive even for the 128gb model and since i have a Rampage III gene with a 6gb Marvell 9128 controller i was thinking of buying one.
Finally 3 days ago the drive was 250$ on newegg so i bought it.
Going around on forum i discover with great disappointment that the 6gbs Marvell controller "apparently" don't issue the TRIM command, is it true ?
Nobodies seem to have a definitive answer, Crucial don't have one, Marvell are under NDA so they don't answer anyone, Asus Told somebody that they should use the Intel controller instead to ensure TRIM support.
1- Is the Marvell controller supporting Trim and is there a way to test that ? (the "fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify" command is not the answer because it's only telling if the OS is issuing the command and that's not where the problem is.)
2- Some Claim that with the latest Marvell driver which is 1.0.00.1051 make the TRIM working. Some claim that it don't.
3-Other claim that the Microsoft ACHI drivers instead of Marvell's one work with TRIM.
It would be very nice if you Anand could test that particular scenario (C300 With Marvell 9128 6gbs windows 7 64) To see if the TRIM command work.
In the end not only me will benefit, but the whole community as well.
Thank you in advance! Reply

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Google Fiber Goes Live Near Stanfordby Jason Inofuentes on 8/22/2011 9:52 AM EST
- Posted in
45 Comments
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SlyNine1 - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkThats amazing, I hope they come to Cheyenne W.y.!
The grade should say, HOLY S#!t just like in unreal 2004 lol. Reply
arnavvdesai - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkI believe Tata Communications is an Indian company. Are they providing some logistical support to Google? Frankly though I wonder why Google would need them. Reply
gsk_maverick - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkU believe?
for an indian u r pretty uninformed.
http://www.tatacommunications.com/map/gfp.html Reply
ninjustin - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkWhy is the land blue and the water white on that map? That's a horrible choice for a world map. My head is still spinning. Reply
Taft12 - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkThey need Tata because Verizon and AT&T desperately want you to continue to believe we can't have internet speeds like this in the USA "because the USA is larger than European and Asian countries".
I, for one, would welcome new Indian telecom overlords! Reply
mixim - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkAh, just to rub it in your guys face. HEre in sweden its pretty common with 100 mbit and 1gbps internet in apartment houses. I pay $30 a month for it! Reply
kxp - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkNot that common but becoming increasingly popular in Estonia as well. I can get PON (passive optical network) connection 100/20 for 24€ (34$) or actually I should say I have it for over a year now. The project started about 1 and a half years ago.
This actually isn't only 1 provider but all 3 major providers offer similar solutions for similar prices (one goes for 120/10 and powerboost to 150 - eurodocsis)
Hoping to get faster speeds this autumn but not sure about it. The official routers only support 100MBit but the GPON ONT supports over 3,5GBps. Reply
TyphoidMary - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkWhere abouts do you live in Estonia? Tallin? Reply
kxp - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkYes as I said, I live in Estonia and more precisely Tallinn but those connections are available in all of the bigger cities in estonia. Reply
JarredWalton - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkHow much do you pay in taxes, though? Reply
Wierdo - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkMore than we do, but they get free healthcare (world's number one in quality) and college education (i hear they actually pay people to study in college) among other things. Reply
Exodite - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkTo be fair Sweden's healthcare isn't very close to the top of the list anymore, it's still mostly government funded though. Reply
kmmatney - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkI was paid to get my Master's degree here in the USA (Materials Engineering at UCLA to be exact). My tuition was paid and I made about $20K a year on top of that...that was back in the mid 1990's. This is common in engineering, though. (and somehow we have a shortage of engineers). Reply
Wierdo - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkWell yes, we're talking bachelor degrees in this context.
Masters is different, it brings in prestige to the schools in form of research, they'll happily pay for it. Undergrads don't get the same kinda treatment, with the exception of a handful of overachievers in some cases. Reply
inplainview - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkWhat taxes got do with anything? Jealous much?
Go get sick and see how much your taxes buy. You win. Dumbest post to date. Reply
sigmatau - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkI thought the same. Only in America one can't praise their neighboor but instead have to minimize them to make them feel better of their shortcommings.
The question that Americans should be asking is "how much do others save by not paying for private health insurance vs extra taxes in a single payer?" It kills me that these fools can scream about others's higher taxes but so conveniently forget they are being bent over by insurance companies.
Remember, Americans pay over 2x what the next country spends on health care. It doesn't matter if it comes from taxes or the lovely check you send to your robber barons. Reply
Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkThere is only one truthful answer: too much
Here in Finland, we have 23% VAT. Income tax is progressive but up to ~50% if you earn enough. Reply
Exodite - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkMore than almost everywhere else in the world.
It's not a fair comparison though, considering what else those taxes pay for.
To mention a few things a higher tax burden gets you...
* A minimum of 5 weeks paid vacation. Paid higher than your work weeks at that.
* ~15-20 days worth of national holidays, also work-free and full paid.
* Tax-funded unemployment benefits.
* Tax funded retirement benefits.
* Free education, including higher education. You only get 6 years worth of funding for university studies but you don't have to pay for admission or attendance, only literature.
* State-funded healthcare, everything past 900 SEK a year in medical care and everything past 1800 SEK a year in medicine is free.
Basically the higher tax burden is very much true but it's not really applicable to the network infrastructure argument.
I believe the issue in the US is mostly due to the geographical monopolies, high price of admission and the inane need to build competing infrastructure for the same purpose.
To make a comparison to another much-maligned area - telephony. Every telecom carrier in Sweden use the same bands, both for 2G, 3G and presumably LTE as well as that network is slowly expanding.
That makes the market far more mobile, and by extension competitive. Reply
inplainview - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkI've been getting 200 MB/s for about 3 years here in Finland, and like Maxim, I pay around €50. Reply
rc121 - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkyou guys in europe realize that Sweden is about the size of California and Finland is smaller than New Mexico, right? It seems like its a tad bit easier to cover those countries in fiber and make it affordable than blanketing the entire US.
Not to say that I'm not jealous of the speeds, but its easy to understand why its going to take awhile to have access to those speeds in every US market. Reply
Spivonious - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkI may be wrong, but isn't it government-subsidized too?
I'd love to see speeds like this across the U.S., but I don't see a demand for them. The real future is 4G LTE. Putting up a tower is a lot easier than running fiber in the ground. Reply
kxp - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkSorry to burst your bubble but LTE isn't actually 4G. LTE-Advanced is and that is still under developement. LTE is the closest they've come so far to achieving real 4G.
Unfortuanately most US carriers are used to lying to their customers and brand even HSPA+ and CDMA as 4G.
According to the standard, to be certified as 4G you need to have 1GBps for stationeri clients and 100Mbps for moving clients. Those are theoretical speeds of course.
The other thing about 4G is that it costs too much to spread to rural areas. The demand is too low for an investment of this size.
For the part that small countries are easier to cover - they're actually not. The technology and the investment is quite big for newer tech and clients aren't really keen on paying it. Bigger networks have more money to spend and test out new technologies. What's harder for them is to have enaugh stability in the system to support all of the load that clients can and probably will make. Reply
TheMouse - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - linkYou're misinformed. LTE (and WIMAX for that matter) is indeed 4G. Reply
Conficio - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkAnd what do you think does the back haul to those towers? You guessed it, it is fiber.
LTE and other wireless technologies is only for the last mile access. And it can't compete with fiber in terms of capacity. Not by a long shot, unless you give up the enormous spectrum allocated to radio/TV and the military. And even then there is a limit. Reply
jbooth - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkWhile the point about most countries in europe being sized like individual US states, that doesn't address why even reasonably sized cities here have such terrible broadband. It isn't like I live in a po-dunk town (100k+ pop) but large parts of this community don't even have more than a single broadband option (bombcast). In theory ATT/SBC was doing uverse, but it seems that was only for the parts of town already serviced by their DSL and they're missing my neighborhood... despite it being built in the late 60s.
Too bad we lost out on the google fibre bid. Reply
Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkThere is also a lot bigger market in US. US is a lot more densely lived (especially big cities) compared to Scandinavia so putting fiber in big cities shouldn't be a problem. Fiber is only available in big cities here in Finland (and mainly on new buildings), so it's not like we all have fiber. I'm still using 10Mb/s ADSL even though I live in Helsinki (the capital of Finland).
I think it's more about overall network scheme in US. From what I have heard, there is less competition (e.g. one ISP owns this are and the other owns that area) in the US, given that you still have those ridiculous data caps and hefty prices. When there is no competition, the ISP can do whatever they want and in this case, they have no need to install fiber as people will be staying as their customers anyway. No competition, no innovative services.
It is true that our governments have supported the fiber program though. Reply
ajp_anton - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkI never understood the size argument. If it's so "easy" to get fast internet in a small country, wouldn't it also be easy to do it in one state? And by extension all or most states "individually"?
Not to mention individual cities. Sweden and Finland combined have the same amount of people as Los Angeles. Reply
Exodite - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkThe US is about ~22 times larger than Sweden, talking about surface area, while enjoying ~33 times the population.
Any argument regarding population density is thus nonsensical, though I can understand why it's popular.
Fiber in Sweden isn't government subsidized per see, though a lot of the initial infrastructure that were built for SUNET (the Swedish University NETwork) were obviously done with government money since the universities are state-funded.
What's happening is that cities and individual companies owning/renting housing are building fiber into the apartments and leasing out the actual management to existing ISPs.
For example, the company who rents out my apartment provides 10 Mbit fiber as part of the basic package (along with water, garbage collection etc.) and I can choose between 7 different ISPs when it comes to upgrading the service. Currently enjoying 100 Mbit for 69 SEK a month (~11 USD).
It's a great system since it means ISPs don't have to lay down their own fiber out to each end-user but can focus on management and service.
Since the fiber is dug down and installed en masse it also keep the pricing down. Reply
Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkIt's actually different here in Finland. With ADSL, I can get the ISP of my choice because the lanes are not owned by any specific ISP. However, with fiber, the fiber is usually owned and installed by a specific ISP.
They do this because if I have ISP A atm and have no reason to change (ADSL prices are fairly similar), the ISP B can install fiber and thus get me as their customer (higher speed + cheaper bill = nobody will refuse). Reply
Exodite - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkAs long as ISPs don't try to force higher prices I suppose that could work out as well.
Are ISPs mandated to share their infrastructure with others, for fair rates, in Finland as well?
That particular rule sets a precedent that discourages price inflation as well I'd say. Reply
Kristian Vättö - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - linkI'm not 100% sure about that but I would think so. At least the prices are very reasonable. Reply
Wierdo - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkSize is less important than lack of initiative in our market and lack of line sharing requirements.
The US market is not much of a free market, there's no need to invest in infrastructure when no one can afford to enter your turf and compete, besides, who the heck wants ten phone/cable/electric/driveways lines to their home, line sharing is the wisest thing they did in Europe.
The slow but profitable progress on this side of the Atlantic is a good situation for the monopolies/duopolies but bad for the consumers. Reply
Conficio - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkIt's certainly not the size of a country but population density that should count at best. So if that is true, where are the 1 GBps offers in the big cities (NY, SF, Boston, Chicago, etc.)?
The difference is that in the US the ISPs are granted area monopolies or duopolies by the virtue of the right of way. if You don't believe me, go to your town hall and have a look at the contracts that the telco/cable companies have with your city government.
In many European states there have been government monopolies for telco and when those got dismantled in the 80s, they did own the wires and the rights of way. Now they have to sublease their cables and their facilities for decent (government controlled) prices. So the end consumer companies compete for your business on the same lines.
And the government subsidies are in the government payed for infrastructure of rights of way and facilities from the government monopoly days. Similar subsidies have been granted in the US too. At the very least the government used imiinent domain to get the right of way needed in some cases. Reply
Taft12 - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkBut we don't have those speeds in ANY U.S. markets.
If those countries are the size of California and New Mexico, how come we can't cover even a single small state with HIGHER population density than those countries? Reply
dali71 - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkWe've had gigabit fiber available in Chattanooga, TN for a year. Reply
Zappcatt - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkhttp://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2010/12/13/sonic-net-sel...
Sonic.net today announced it has been selected to operate and support the trial fiber-to-the-home network Google is building at Stanford University. This experimental project will test new fiber construction and operation methods, while delivering full gigabit speeds to approximately 850 faculty and staff owned homes on campus. Reply
GotThumbs - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkAs the internet is slowly replacing free broadcast channels for news and entertainment.... This nation needs to move towards a free wifi network. There is no reason why people should not have access to this 'super information highway'. Premium service could still be provided by cable companies through strict regulations to prevent price gouging or service throttling.
Lets get back to being a great America.
Thanks Reddit for the jaw dropping screen shot. Reply
Hrel - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkHoly BATMAN!!!!!!! Hold on, let me do the math right quick. Yeah, 303.36 times faster than my current "broadband" internet. Let me be clear here. I live 40 minutes from Chicago. I have the FASTEST internet available to me. I pay for 6MPBS downloads. There has been "an unidentified issue on the line" for years at this point. So realistically I get 5.12 down .63 up. Ping is 53ms.
Seriously Google; I will gladly pay you 100/month for this internet. But so help me if you start putting bandwidth caps on it like everyone else... (shakes fist).
Honestly, they cannot roll this out fast enough! Reply
JasonInofuentes - Saturday, August 27, 2011 - linkSo bandwidth caps are, ostensibly, there to ensure good performance for all users. Keeping a small group of users from dominating the available bandwidth should leave plenty for everyone else. Cable companies use fiber as their backbone and use nodes to serve a group of houses, so the caps are really an effort to protect all users on a given node. If Google is really bringing fiber from the house to the street and the backbone is strong enough then they really shouldn't need to cap. If the backbone is weak, they still might not need to cap if everyone plays nice. I'm guessing they will build out the KC network properly and keep it cap-free. Reply
ar38070 - Monday, August 22, 2011 - linkWhile this speed is great with ATT's download cap (150GB/month) you will use up your monthly quota in 3 hours! Reply
skyyspam - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - linkWhy would google need to beta test something that's obviously going to be successful in the USA?
I look at it simply: if you can offer an internet service that is leagues above and beyond all of the cable, DSL, and fiber providers--at roughly the equivalent cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure, you will NOT fail.
I'm going to be so sore when I have to leave Japan (and not JUST for my internet service). Unless google decides to serve where I happen to end up! Reply
SandmanWN - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - linkIt's Google, the BETA comes from how much information they will be able to data mine from your traffic and sale to whomever they see fit. Reply
JasonInofuentes - Saturday, August 27, 2011 - linkThe beta in this case has nothing to do with market viability, yes, it will be successful; but will the equipment they're planning to use be enough to provide a flawless experience for the users of KC? I think it's brilliant to trial it in a techie area like Stanford. These are geeks like us, and given the opportunity to experience these speeds we would all do whatever we could to saturate our 150 Mbps allotment as much as possible as often as possible. So if their network could survive 400 of us living in one neighborhood, it can survive anything. Reply
crizCraig - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - linkhttp://www.wepolls.com/p/2028308 Reply
houkouonchi - Friday, September 02, 2011 - linkI will admit the price is nice but its not THAT big of a deal speed wise. Its just slightly faster than my 150/75 fios (a little better upstream). Reply


text:
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