Slow shutdown on SSD vs. HD model?

Hi. I was playing around with both the SSD and HD Macbook Air models in my local Apple store yesterday and noticed a very significant difference in shutdown times. I tried two different machines of each type to make sure it wasn't just some config thing. What I saw, repeatedly, was HD shutdown times (from selection of "Shutdown" to screen black) of less than 10 seconds, and SSD shutdown times of 35-40 seconds. Based on benchmarks I've seen so far, the SSD is slower in some write operations, but not (in benchmarks) 4 times slower. If this only affects shutdown times it's not very important to me, but if it truly indicates that large a difference in write times, the SSD is looking significantly less attractive.

I have two questions for the community at large:

1) Have others observed this discrepancy? Do people with SSD Airs see 35+ second shutdown times regularly?

2) Any speculation as to what might cause this given that benchmarks don't show SSD to be 4x slower on writes? Is there something (cleanup? cache flush?) that SSDs have to do when shutting down that regular spinning platter HDs don't have to do? I'm not aware of anything like that.

Thanks all for any feedback you may have.

-John

Good to hear...

Thanks Diabolic, that's certainly more like what I would have expected. Appreciate the feedback.

-John

Consultant said:

I was told by the store employee that they've installed security software which extends startup / shutdown times.

Click to expand...

That would make sense, but then why the difference between SSD and non-SSD times? Maybe the software writes a bunch of crap out at shutdown?

-John