Western Digital's SiliconEdge Blue SSD: It's Plenty Good Enough For Me

I just had a particularly memorable telephone conversation. Remember last Friday, when I told you that my primary computer is currently out for repair courtesy of a DOA HDD (not the first time I’ve experienced such a setback, I might add)? About an hour ago, I received a voicemail message from a customer support representative in Apple’s Austin, TX repair depot, alerting me that the technician had found evidence that the MacBook Air had experienced moisture exposure. As such, she said, the extended warranty on my system (with 10 months still to go until expiration) was void. And therefore, I owed Apple $430 plus tax for the repairs to the ‘hard drive, keyboard and top casing’.

Keyboard and top casing? But they’d just been replaced in late May! And this system has never been exposed to moisture! With visions of Apple trying to get out of its warranty obligations dancing in my head, and admittedly with steam coming out my ears and nostrils, I jumped on the phone and called Apple back. All was soon set right, with a fair bit of chuckling as an added bonus. Ever since my cat-plus-Merlot goblet trashed a Dell laptop two years ago, I’ve religiously kept rubberized keyboard covers on all of my systems. The one on the MacBook Air is translucent and, for unknown reasons, deposits a visible off-white-colored film on the black-colored keys below it.

The technician saw the film and, although there wasn’t any sign of damage inside the MacBook Air, deemed it moisture-compromised…even though the whole point of the keyboard cover is to prevent such a scenario. Since the Apple Depot repairs everything they find amiss with a system that comes in, regardless of whether the issue has been reported by the owner or not, I’m going to get a new keyboard and top casing…again…I suspect this is why I got them in late May, although the system wasn’t flagged with a repair hold back then. And, if it gets on the last Fedex shipment out today, it’ll be overnighted and back in my hands some time tomorrow.

With my primary computer currently away, I’m temporarily making do with alternative resources. As such, I spent part of last weekend tackling some long-planned and long-delayed computer upgrades. Two months ago, I mentioned that I was experimenting with the Google Chrome browser because my netbook was plagued by virtual memory swap paralysis with Mozilla Firefox. I had a 1 GByte DDR2-667 SoDIMM allocated for the system (DDR2-533 memory works, too, although using it might preclude overclocking), but I hadn’t gotten around to installing it. Five minutes after I first picked up a screwdriver, and thanks to this video:

I was running 2 GBytes of total system memory, and the system’s much snappier as a result. And yes, it still stably overclocks to 2 GHz!

The MSI Wind U100 netbook’s diminutive keyboard and tiny LCD quickly became tiresome, however, so I decided to tackle my first-generation MacBook next. At the time, it was running OS 10.4 on a 250 GByte Western Digital HDD. With my MacBook Air experience still fresh in my mind, I decided to put a fresh build of Time Machine backup-supportive OS 10.5 on the system. And instead of installing the O/S and applications to a traditional hard drive, I went with a 128 GByte WD SiliconEdge Blue SSD instead (the stock photo below shows the 256 GByte variant; it also comes in a 64 GByte flavor):

The SiliconEdge Blue was the highest capacity 2.5″ SSD in my arsenal, which was my primary motivation for selecting it over the other flash memory-based drives available to me. I was already aware that it wasn’t a particularly standout performer, although AnandTech’s primary ‘beef’ with the device didn’t seem to be with its functionality or performance but with its price tag. As such, I feel compelled to point out that WD’s made some recent positive moves in this regard; I’ve seen the 128 GByte variant for as low as $219.99 of late.

WD had bought SiliconSystems more than a year ago, but I’m not sure what if any influence the incremental acquired engineering resources had on this particular design. It employs off-the-shelf flash memory along with a media controller from JMicron, although WD reportedly made its own optimizations to the stock firmware. Nonetheless, I’m very pleased with my mass storage decision. I’m a bit chagrined to admit that although I’ve tested plenty of SSDs, this is the first time I’ve undertaken day-to-day use of one in a system. And it’s everything I’ve claimed about solid-state storage versus the rotating media precursor; fast system boots and application launches, rugged, low power, and completely silent (expecially noticeable when the system fan isn’t alternatively whining away).

After installing OS 10.5 and the innumerable system updates that Apple’s made to it, I then tackled program and data installs. Having access to the Time Machine backup for the MacBook Air (the most recent iteration of which I thankfully made right before the system crashed) made things very simple, not to mention up-to-date. Time Machine’s file format is called a sparse bundle (also commonly referred to as a sparsebundle):

and it’s pretty cool. Opening it up helps you understand what’s going on:

By means of explanation, I’d copied the ~80 GByte sparse bundle from my NETGEAR ReadyNAS (one partition of which was acting as my Time Machine backup destination) to a 120 GByte Samsung S1 Mini 1.8″ external HDD:

then USB-tethered the S1 Mini to the MacBook. Like its precursor the sparse image, the sparse bundle only takes up as much disk space as the data contained within it (versus the full image file alternative). But as Wikipedia explains, “Instead of a monolithic file, a sparse bundle is a bundle (directory) that stores the disk image as banded data files.”

Simplistically speaking, Time Machine works by initially doing a full backup of the source drive, followed by period backups of files that have been added and replaced (also noting files that have been deleted). When you open up a particular Time Machine sparse bundle directory, you’re provided with all files in their current states at that particular backup date and time, regardless of which files were actually backed up then versus in prior sessions.

Restoring the entire MacBook Air backup image to the MacBook wouldn’t have made any sense, since the underlying hardware of the two systems is so different. However, I was able to selectively copy archived application installers to the MacBook, useful because in many cases the latest versions offered for OS 10.4 (therefore resident on the MacBook’s old HDD) were out of date compared to their OS 10.5-cognizant replacements. I was also able to copy over my Mozilla Thunderbird email profile and, after I took a wild guess and deleted all of the index files in the directory tree, Thunderbird finally opened crash-free and subsequently auto-recreated them.

Once I get the MacBook Air back, I’ll attempt a Time Machine restoration via the Migration Assistant. I’m cautiously optimistic, given that the backup archive seems intact from my recent MacBook experiments. I’ll let you know how the resurrection undertaking goes; it’s comforting to know that I have a fully operational (and noticeably speedier, in fact) backup system in the form of the MacBook available to me in case of any hiccups. And once the MacBook Air warranty expires next May, I’ll likely dissect it and swap out the HDD for a SSD, too. In anticipation, in fact, I’ve already ordered a 1.8″ ZIF PATA-to-2.5″ PATA adapter.