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SSD Speed Variations in 2014 MacBook Air Still Due to Drive Brand Mix, Not Broader Changes
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You both need to read the news story again.
To save you time - nothing has changed. The drive performance is exactly the same as the 2013 model - i.e. awesome!!! It is affected by brand of drive regardless of year of MBA model. One brand is a bit less awesome than the others. That is all.
What if, you paid that much money on a machine that was gauarnateed to get 200MB/s..
you both got 200MB/s.. he just happened to luck out and get more.
Its not a "loss" for you.. just a happy surprise for him..
You both need to read the news story again.
To save you time - nothing has changed. The drive performance is exactly the same as the 2013 model - i.e. awesome!!! It is affected by brand of drive regardless of year of MBA model. One brand is a bit less awesome than the others. That is all.
The drive performance being exactly the same (albeit excellent, as you pointed out) IS evidence that upgrading from the 2013 model to the 2014 model does not make sense from a performance standpoint.
Why would it make sense to upgrade form the MBA late 2013 to the MBA 2014 if, as you yourself adequately state that "nothing has changed"?
You are saying Apple pick weak and cheap items for their machines?
I thought Apple selected the best components. that's what has always been said here.
Oh and to educate yourself here are the results of real torture tests on the "cheap and weak TLC chips you talk about"
The general assumption is a WAF of around 3.0 for normal consumer use with SSDs that don't employ compression tricks. That translates to a lifespan of 75 years. Even when you push an SSD to the max by downloading lots of movies everyday up to an average of 30 GiB per day, the SSD will still last you 24 years. Nomatter how you use it, it will last longer than the period you plan on using it (most people like to add more capacity after a certain time). A functional lifespan of 10 years is already unusually high for a storage medium.
With an average lifespan of 75 years for the TLC memory chips, consumers have absolutely nothing to worry about.
So, in other words, Macworld was being stupid and they should be ashamed of themselves.
If you want to get mad at Apple because you can't tell which hard drive you're getting, then that's a completely rational complaint. The argument can be made that Apple should source components that are similar in performance. If a particular SSD supplier can't keep up with quality, then Apple should cut them from the mix.
If you want to get mad at Apple because you can't tell which hard drive you're getting, then that's a completely rational complaint. The argument can be made that Apple should source components that are similar in performance. If a particular SSD supplier can't keep up with quality, then Apple should cut them from the mix.
Thats dumb..
That's like saying, my 2008 MacBook Pro had 24bit color, and the new one has 24bit color.. Its exactly the same, why upgrade??
You are saying Apple pick weak and cheap items for their machines?
I thought Apple selected the best components. that's what has always been said here.
Oh and to educate yourself here are the results of real torture tests on the "cheap and weak TLC chips you talk about"
The general assumption is a WAF of around 3.0 for normal consumer use with SSDs that don't employ compression tricks. That translates to a lifespan of 75 years. Even when you push an SSD to the max by downloading lots of movies everyday up to an average of 30 GiB per day, the SSD will still last you 24 years. Nomatter how you use it, it will last longer than the period you plan on using it (most people like to add more capacity after a certain time). A functional lifespan of 10 years is already unusually high for a storage medium.
With an average lifespan of 75 years for the TLC memory chips, consumers have absolutely nothing to worry about.
Hey guys, don't disrupt blind fanboy rage with facts. That isn't allowed here.
Sorry I misinterpreted you. I did not think anyone would be silly enough to upgrade from 2013 to 2014. I assumed you meant upgrade to 2013 or 2014 from something older. The original contention being that the 2014 was in fact worse than the 2013 - now being proven not to be true. At $100 dollar's cheaper the 2014 is obviously the better choice coming from anywhere else except the 2013 model (but seriously....who would do that unless they broke to 2013 model ?)
Well, if your options are to stick with the 2013 you just bought or sell it and go for the new 2014, upgrading would be stupid, if for no other reason than your 2013 model is now valued a hundred dollars less than it was a few weeks ago.
But I think the point is if you have an older machine and need an upgrade, theres no change in the disk write speed that would indicate you might want to go with a 2013 over a 2014. Which for those of us who might upgrade in the next year, is nice to know.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Sorry, you might be in the wrong thread. There's 2 others going in which "Samsung makes junk", "Samsung can't innovate anything", "Samsung is the devil" nearby. Here's one of those (actually many) situations where Samsung makes something Apple doesn't, Apple chooses Samsung parts for Apple hardware (but somehow no one can see Apple as stupid for buying from a junk-maker), and Samsung parts objectively outperform those of other major competitors (which flies in the face of the junk tag too).
Meanwhile, over in the other threads, people are swearing to never buy anything by Samsung again. Then they are told that means they are not buying anything built by Apple so they adapt saying "Samsung branded" which really means a piece of plastic or a sticker on the front determines whether they will buy or not buy a product.
Personally, I own a bunch of Apple and Samsung stuff and think they are about top of their games. I wish they would find a way back to being happier partners because that combo delivers the best incarnations of Apple stuff: "I hope I get the Samsung drive", "I hope I get the Samsung screen", etc.
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Get back to me when you're still using the same SSD for over 20 years.
People who slam TLC are just regurgitating what they read on the internet. It's not going to run out of writes anytime in it's realistic lifespan.
Well said. here here.
I had to laugh at the "I won't every buy any Samsung junk" comments.
But I'll buy an Apple case full of Samsung parts as it says Apple on the back.
It's honestly amazing how nuts some people are here.
well, continuously testing ssds for write speed is kind of a dumb idea, as all SSDs have a limited lifetime in terms of data written to it. so running long-long write tests can impact the expected lifespan of the device.
imo, the big thing where SSDs excel, is the IO per seconds. this is one sees as fast, as while cold booting the OS, a lot of small files are accessed faster than it would be possible with spinning platters.
normally one does not simply move bunch of gigabytes of data all the time from external devices to the SSD. but if it happens, it is pretty hard do find something (usb drive, network attached storage, or network connectivity at all) to keep up with such enormous read speeds, like ~400MBps or so. whatever.
Or Safari...
Love a snappier Safari.
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The only time I found myself saturating SSD i/o was using vmware Fusion and running three VM's each processing data on the SSD.
I think most mean Samsung (phones/tablets). They make killer displays, memory, drives and appliances for the house.
However, they copied a lot of their tech from Sharp. The only reason Samsung beat out Sharp, was with their marketing. Sharp doesn't advertise much. That's why their products are significantly cheaper than Samsung and sometimes a little better in specs.
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how so?