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gagecloutier

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 21, 2012
90
3
Today, I picked up one of the new base Haswell 11" MBAs. Absolutely love it so far. The drastically improved battery life in conjunction with the wickedly fast PCIe SSD makes it an excellent purchase. However, I noticed that my write speeds (315.2 MB/s) are significantly lower than my read speeds (719.0 MB/s). Usually write speeds are a little bit slower than read speeds, but not less than half. Anyone else who noticed this?
 
yup same here, seems the ssd on the 13" is better..!
Hmm interesting. It doesn't make a monumental difference to me for how I plan to use it and exchanging it for a 13" MBA isn't an option for me... I want the 11" for portability! I'll wait and see if Apple addresses it. If not, I'm content.
 
Hmm interesting. It doesn't make a monumental difference to me for how I plan to use it and exchanging it for a 13" MBA isn't an option for me... I want the 11" for portability! I'll wait and see if Apple addresses it. If not, I'm content.

OWC shows a test with the same issue on the 128SSD but there is a video on YouTube where they are testing a 256SSD and it is 700 read/write I guess the issue is with the 128?

Speed test 256 sad

http://youtu.be/vb4-8UXg0qE
 
In the video test, both machines had the 128.

Video in this thread:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1596201/
 
The higher the capacity the higher the write speeds, this is true with all SSDs. The reason being there are more physical flash chips to spread the write load across.
 
The higher the capacity the higher the write speeds, this is true with all SSDs. The reason being there are more physical flash chips to spread the write load across.
Wasn't aware of that, thank you! It's no real cause for concern then.
 
The higher the capacity the higher the write speeds, this is true with all SSDs. The reason being there are more physical flash chips to spread the write load across.

Only if you have unused Space on the SSD though right? ie. if your 512 SSD is 500 full and you open a 10GB file your performance will be screwed
 
It has nothing to do with 11" or 13" BTW...my 512GB 11" is rocking the 700MB+/sec speeds, as well.

11_inch_macbook_air_512GB_samsung.png
 
and my 13 128 has 400ish writes (also has samsung sad according to about my mac).
 
So the 256gb model and 512gb model on the 11.6 inch mac air have similar or vastly different write speeds? how similar/different if so?
 
It has nothing to do with 11" or 13" BTW...my 512GB 11" is rocking the 700MB+/sec speeds, as well.

Image
So that means for 2013 MBA, the 128GB SSD is at 300-400/700, while the 256GB and 512GB are at 700+/700?

It's the read speed that matters more right? Things like booting up, opening apps, waking from stand-by, etc.
 
Often with SSd's the 256/512 models are doubled up 128's. Hence you get the increased performance. Like the difference between single channel and dual channel.
 
Yeah, read speed is the more important one unless you're doing some crazy high-end multimedia encoding, in which case, you probably aren't going to be buying a MBA anyway. 4xx is hella fast for the 128s. (I got mine in this morning hoping to get one of the 7xx 128s, but didn't. I'm not bent, like I said, it's very quick for anything I would ever do, so I'm keeping it and not gambling on a return).
 
The sequential read and write speeds from black magic mean diddly squat when it comes to system performance. What really matters is the random access IOPS rating.
 
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