I think you give credit a bit generously here. And in any case, how do you explain 1) the linearity and consistency of results 2) the fact it's consistently slower than a windows with Trim support ?

If the blocks were truely erased, at the very least the peak write would be significantly faster, but it's not.

The only other wacky possibility would be for the OS to be the bottleneck.

They used the "write zero" disk erase method, which in fact un-erase every NAND block of the disk, which in turn forces the disk to erase each block again as it writes. Thats why they see such consistency of results : they are measuring the worst possible case where the disk is forced to the slow path for each block.

To erase NAND, you need to erase it by block, and the resulting block is full of 1's. Writing to NAND is a question of writing zeros in places, you can't write 1's on NAND unless you erase it.

So in a way, their test is showing that OSX is much, much better than windows when the disk is dirty, but that apple hasn't implemented the "trim" that allows the disk to re-erase nand 'free' blocks.

... aka Captain Cyborg, is a running joke in the UK for many, many years.

His name associated with this event makes me smirks in anticipation of The Register coverage..

I think there should be a nobel of engineering or something similar, given to whomever designed that rover.

It /never/ happens in real life that you can get away with designing a piece of equipment that outlasts it's fail-by-date by so much. In most companies nowayday, these guys would be in trouble !

It sort of ought to be encouraged somehow...