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sk8ordie

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 16, 2007
149
0
California
Any guestimates to the MacBook Air turning on instantly with the Flash SSD...like an iPod? On/Off booting would be pretty cool.
 

mick4394

macrumors 6502a
Oct 25, 2006
554
0
Flyover country
If it's anything like the Eee Pc, yes, it will boot faster than hell.

My Eee boots XP in under fifteen seconds. We all know that OSX boots waaaay quicker than Windows. So, I think we can assume that Air with SSD will boot unbelievably fast. I'm guessing this thing will be as close to "instant on" as you can get.
 

connectingrodd4

macrumors newbie
Jan 15, 2008
15
0
but modern flash has wear leveling logic that can extend the life way beyond that of hard drives, as well. It all depends on how cheap they went for the flash disk they put in the thing.

perhaps but do you really think that apple didn't cut costs in the flash drive?
 

mrwizardno2

macrumors 6502a
Jun 19, 2007
818
62
Columbus, OH
perhaps but do you really think that apple didn't cut costs in the flash drive?

Well, no one can say that at the moment! You can't even argue the opposite, so the best we can do is wait to see what is in the beast.

I have a slight bit of faith in Apple, and would hope they would consider choosing an appropriate SSD for use in a mobile computer (many writes / re-writes).
 

Pressure

macrumors 603
May 30, 2006
5,043
1,384
Denmark
it will boot fast but not instantly, also consider that a flash drive has a very limited life span

As do Hard drives. Hard drives will start to wear out, before you run out of write cycles as you would on flash.

in theory a hard drive will have much longer life span than a flash

but modern flash has wear leveling logic that can extend the life way beyond that of hard drives, as well. It all depends on how cheap they went for the flash disk they put in the thing.

Most new Solid State Drives has the same amount of read/write cycles as a mechanical harddrive has. It has become a non-issue.

But Solid State Drives do usually suffer from slow random write performance.
 

chewietobbacca

macrumors 6502
Jun 18, 2007
428
0
check out some of Anandtech's articles on SSD's, they do comparisons with the WD Raptors which have long been the speed kings for boot up (i love mine) - problem of course is the cost / GB is huge!
 

iW00t

macrumors 68040
Nov 7, 2006
3,286
0
Defenders of Apple Guild
but modern flash has wear leveling logic that can extend the life way beyond that of hard drives, as well. It all depends on how cheap they went for the flash disk they put in the thing.

Wear leveling counts for nothing when you consider that the 64GB drive will be half full when you load in Leopard and iLife and various "Big Bang" games and bonuses.

Where is the drive controller going to "wear level" on an almost full drive? Move some existing data off so it can take twice the wear? Haha, that's a nice one.
 

n8236

macrumors 65816
Mar 1, 2006
1,065
32
They need to make faster SSDs!

Every company is out there to make them have larger capacity, but how about also making them faster too!:D
 

n8236

macrumors 65816
Mar 1, 2006
1,065
32
they should have started timer after the chime, thats when book starts after the memory check.

Exactly my thought! And then after the chime, the HD hasn't even began to spin yet. (not immediately anyways)

So that would actually put the first gen. MBP @ around 15 seconds.

And the MBA? I'd be damned, a possible 12 second boot! Holy ****!
 
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