MacBook Air 1.6Ghz HDD vs 1.8Ghz SSD Benchmarks

[ccantrell]

Um...wanna clarify which model applications load faster?

The 1.6HD model was 1 to 2 seconds faster on Safari loads, after the initial load. iTunes & iPhoto were about the same on both systems.

Second, keep in mind that doing the same action twice (reopening apps, or refreshing web pages, for instance) get a boost from data caching in RAM and elsewhere- MS-DOS had this way back when (Smartdrive?), so this isn't exactly surprising or groundbreaking tech.

I agree, but would have thought after opening 5 to 6 applications, closing them (ensuring they were not running with 'ps') the cache hit would not be as good as it was.

Even though some things were faster, like the initial application load times & bootup, IMO it is not worth the $1000 price difference. I say this considering what this laptop is focused on. On the road ... all I want is Internet access, email access and basic services. IMO, the MBA hits this perfectly.

Has anyone been able to test VMware and Parallels?

-chris

 

[bxs]

I agree, but would have thought after opening 5 to 6 applications, closing them (ensuring they were not running with 'ps') the cache hit would not be as good as it was.

Even though some things were faster (initial application load times & bootup), IMO it is not worth the $1000 price difference, especially considering what this laptop is focused on. I would like to see real-world testing of things like VMware and Parallels.

-chris

This is the crux of the matter for many people - "IMO it is not worth the $1000 price difference"

Like most things some people look at computers from a price/performance position whereas others will look at the same thing from a price/benefits&capability position.

The decisions made therefore can be quite opposite to each other.

 

[flashframe]

Don't know what drives were being sold most

But today at the Apple Store in The Grove, Los Angeles, people were snapping them up pretty quickly.

 

[tinotopia]

I cant believe people are actually saying a 1.8 with ssd feels like a macpro lol
Jeez iwonder how my 2.6 mbp with dedicated memory and 4gb ram with 64 ssd (got cheap from dell) will feel. Well considering how some of you are saying the MBA feels like a pro then is safe to assume my computer is 2x the macpro.

I would be surprised if it *weren't* faster than a Mac Pro with a spinning disk at doing things that involve reading lots of files. And that describes quite a bit of what you ordinarily do with a computer.

 

[tba03]

so for let's say audio recording, does that mean that it' s better to have the file totally fragmented?

 

[scrambledwonder]

I just touched a MacBook Air in my local Apple Store tonight. Absolutely beguiling. It could have a processor from a Speak 'N Spell and I'd still want it.

I think the majority of people in the store felt the same way.

So say what you will. It's a wonder, regardless of the benchmarks.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

And in real world use of a Dell, Sony, and today the MBA with SSD, I can tell you for normal use the difference is remarkable.

Benchmarks are interesting, but they don't really tell the whole story. Random small reads are something most users do a LOT of. Which is why the SSDs feel so fast in actual use.

Users aren't doing it. The underlying VM and the Kernel do it.

 

[Tosser]

so for let's say audio recording, does that mean that it' s better to have the file totally fragmented?

Digital recording is linear. You certainly don't want a fragmented audiofile. Besides, even if recording, say, four tracks at 24bit/192kHz, you're writing to the disk at 2,11 (2.11 for you americans) MB/s. That's not exactly much.
The disk-speed on that butt-slow iPod-drive doesn't matter when recording. It does matter in other circumstances, but not the recording in itself.

How many tracks do you record ("record"=real time audio-gathering), at what bitrate etc? And what do you use it for? Which programmes do you use?

[Okay, this might actually be better in another thread, but it's all related to whether that iPod drive will live up to his(?) needs]

 

[Rocketman]

My takeaway is the net benefit is more marginal than expected. The value to small files is large, but we are moving to an era of increasingly larger blocks and files, thus minimizing the benefit.

It seems Seagate was right after all. Shocking to me I agree, but undeniably true. ZFS will continue the block size and file size trend thus verifying once again RAID beats ramdisc, except for the boot volume.

Rocketman

 

[shadowfax]

Users aren't doing it. The underlying VM and the Kernel do it.

... now you're just nitpicking. the underlying VM and Kernel do it as a result of user action.

My takeaway is the net benefit is more marginal than expected. The value to small files is large, but we are moving to an era of increasingly larger blocks and files, thus minimizing the benefit.

It seems Seagate was right after all. Shocking to me I agree, but undeniably true. ZFS will continue the block size and file size trend thus verifying once again RAID beats ramdisc, except for the boot volume.

Rocketman

Hmmm, I dunno. On any file transfer on a standard drive, you have an 8-9ms seek time. At least one of those, potentially several. Regardless of block size. So while large block size will reduce the impact of this (and note: the SSD already has a large block size), it's still going to make a difference.

But what's really remarkable to me at this point is the articles discussing SSD transfer rates--Apple, it seems, is using one of the slowest SSD's out there. There are SSD's with transfer rates that could saturate the PATA bus available, or soon to be. That's where we're headed, and that's exciting. Standard hard drives are only going to get faster as the density of the platters increases, and the prospects of that aren't all that great, are they?

 

[nja247]

Shouldn't it have been 1.8 HDD v 1.6 SSD, or maybe the same processor v different hard drives? Quite dumb test to put the model with a slower processor AND drive against the faster in both areas. Basically what I'm saying is that it's obvious to anyone without running any tests that the 1.8 with SSD will be faster than the 1.6 with HDD, so what was the point really?

 

[Rendwich]

A Dumb Question

Okay, the SSD is *much* faster than the HDD for most reads, that's good. But it costs maybe 5-10 times as much as the HDD. Can't we do better?

Why doesn't someone build a notebook with a big, slow, crappy HDD and maybe 16GB of RAM? You load everything you need into RAM when you boot up. Any kind of smart software can keep track of which files you access frequently and automatically load them. This part is slow.

After that, you have the fastest "disk" in the world. You can shut down the HDD right after booting, so there's no power drain use at all until you shut down.

Tigerdirect will sell you 2GB of Macbook RAM for $80 US. x8 =
$640. I'm sure you can find cheaper RAM which will work fine. Plus a big, crappy HDD for permanent storage, maybe $150. Total cost < $800 US.

The speed increase is maybe 2000x faster than an SSD. It's more expensive per GB, but you don't need 64GB of chips because the big, crappy HDD is carrying the bulk load at bootup and shutdown (and maybe a few times in-between).

Are we ready for the Revenge of the RAM Disk? Maybe someone has jammed their Mac Pro with RAM and can comment if they've tried this?

 

[Analog Kid]

I don't know why anyone would make such comments without having a good grasp on the technology. The "small speed increase" you refer to is actually subjectivly large when you take into consideration the normal disk activity of a person (lots of random reads and writes) and the strengths of SSDs (very fast seek speed for navigating between random data locations).

That said, Although the Air will feel faster due to the quick seek time of the SSD, It's not like Apple choose to use the best SSD on the market, nor even a moderately fast one..You can't possibly sit here and dismiss all SSDs as a waste of money that only speed up a "few" apps. That's like dismissing all Intel processors by looking at a Celeron and claiming AMD's are faster.

The truth is it TOTALLY depends on the specific SSD model and manufacturer as to how fast it will be.
There are many different SSD flash technologies and architectures. The macbook Air happens to use a cheaper/less power intensive/slower model than are out there.
You can already purchase 1.8" SSDs that are twice as fast as the one currently in the macbook air

I'm not necessarily disappointed with the SSD that the Air uses. I understand that the costs involved can get pretty big, and I'm glad that Apple even decided to offer an SSD, and a 64GB one instead of a 32GB one. However, I think I've been spoiled by looking at all the announcments from the storage companies about their new super fast SSDs.

I mean HOLY CRAP, Samsung announced their new SATA II 64GB SSDs that are blazing FAST. Check out these specs..
SEQUENTIAL Write speed: 100MB/sec
SEQUENTIAL Read speed: 120MB/sec

I don't remember the random read/write speeds, but they would be even better. You can get them in 1.8" and 2.5". I can't wait to throw one of these in a Macbook Air.

The SSD in the Air is actually slower than nearly all the recent SDD model announcements that I've seen on different tech websites. I would say for people who are on a budget, just get the HDD, and wait until SSD prices come down a bit, and buy a much faster 1.8" SDD. You'll probably spend less than the $1,000 you would be spending now anyways.

Let me start by suggesting that if you are making the argument that people don't understand a technology that you make sure they don't and that you do. Just sayin'...

There's an old adage among engineers: "Better, cheaper, faster-- choose two". Apple chose a performance/price/power tradeoff they felt they could live with.

Here's the only data I can find on the current PATA drive in the Air:
Read: 57MBps
Write: 38MBps
Power: 0.17W active (write)

Here's what I find on the newfangled SATAII drives:
Read: 100MBps
Write: 80MBps
Power: 0.5W active

Since they don't publish datasheets, I can't see what those numbers actually mean. What I gather from this though is they're pumping more power through the system to gain performance. No magic. I'd almost wonder if they were running some sort of RAID under the hood with those numbers. If you're looking for performance, you'll be happier with the new drives, whenever you can get your hands on them, if you're juiced about the longer battery life you'd prefer the existing ones (not that half a Watt counts for much these days). SATA II wasn't chosen because it was necessary to handle the data rates.

You're also missing a link on what OS X's disk access habits are-- what gives you so much confidence that you spend all your time reading little bitty files all over the disk? I see all the numbers listed as uncached, which doesn't match normal use. Looks to me like the type of HDD the Air uses probably has a 2MB cache. Again, no datasheet, but I'd guess the cache can accept writes at 100MB/s, and will probably boost sequential read times if they are OS limited.

On top of the cache you have the OS buffering which will likely read more of the file than you've requested. If you are doing all the little reads and writes that you're suggesting and your disk is slowing you down, then the application should have been written to read in everything up front. The only time I might be doing a lot of little reads all over a disk with no buffer is at application start with highly fragmented disk images. I spend a very small amount of time launching apps during the day.

See how the hard drive starts to beat the flash drive at "random writes" of 256k? That's because it's not random anymore-- it's one seek followed by a bunch of sequential writes.

Writes should only block in very specific cases, most of the time the write call should return almost instantly and the application can get on with its business while the system completes the writes in the background, or at application close (ever notice your preferences don't always get saved if the app crashes?).

All of this starts to point back to my earlier comments-- I'd rather have more RAM than a flash disk for my money. I don't want virtual memory paging out to a device with significantly slower sequential write times.

As scottamoulton so succinctly explained, and I apologize for not being as brief, flash is a very different medium from rotating platters. Even as things are, I'd expect that there are some uses for which flash drives might show a significant benefit. In order to really benefit, Apple would have to significantly rework their file system, their memory manager and their file tree structure, and I haven't heard any talk of that being done.

I'm not arguing the SSD doesn't have any benefits. The only benefit Apple is comfortable trumpeting seems to be increased reliability, and I haven't seen enough data from other sources yet. I suspect there will be power benefits and probably performance benefits under certain conditions. My argument is merely that there are more cost effective ways of getting those benefits and all the superlatives aimed at flash might have been a bit wide of the mark. Additional RAM would be one. Running an external drive would also probably give you a performance boost at the cost of power, but with USB in the equation I'm hesitant to insist on that...

 

[Analog Kid]

When the test runs, it manipulates a small window w/ some various window elements (buttons, text boxes, etc), throws up some text in various font sizes and colors. It runs very quickly, less than 2 seconds tops, and I suspect performance in the test is a function of both processor and memory bus speed.

Score was a little higher this time: 266.72

GPU performance maybe? That looks like the biggest difference on the list...

 

[Lord Sam]

Interesting. It's nice to see the benchmarks though. It makes the 650 buck price for the SSD somehow seem worth it.

 

[Full of Win]

Shouldn't it have been 1.8 HDD v 1.6 SSD, or maybe the same processor v different hard drives? Quite dumb test to put the model with a slower processor AND drive against the faster in both areas. Basically what I'm saying is that it's obvious to anyone without running any tests that the 1.8 with SSD will be faster than the 1.6 with HDD, so what was the point really?

Not dumb, but rather a fact of the newness of the product and the absence of other modes to test with.

In science you strive to remove all but one variable from any experiment; and the difference seen can be correlated to that one variable. However, as in life you sometimes cannot control all the variables to the degree you would like. The test were likely done on what was available due to a limited initial selection, which so happened to have two variables.

 

[OS X Dude]

OK, I'm worried.

My C2D 2.0GHz MB with 1GB RAM only managed 99.84 - nearly same as 1.8GHz SSD MBA

Is that seriously right?

I have an XP partition and 44GB free (53 if i remove unnecessary components like GarageBand). Should I have defragged in Onyx too?

It's just people say the MBA is slow and my MB doesn't seem much faster!!

 

[OS X Dude]

I just touched a MacBook Air in my local Apple Store tonight. Absolutely beguiling. It could have a processor from a Speak 'N Spell.

Speak and Spell - one of Depeche Mode's better albums

hahaha

 

[robinp]

OK, I'm worried.

My C2D 2.0GHz MB with 1GB RAM only managed 99.84 - nearly same as 1.8GHz SSD MBA

Is that seriously right?

I have an XP partition and 44GB free (53 if i remove unnecessary components like GarageBand). Should I have defragged in Onyx too?

It's just people say the MBA is slow and my MB doesn't seem much faster!!

I wouldn't worry. Look at the specs: You have a slightly faster CPU, slower HD, less RAM, better GPU.

So some components are quicker, some are slower. I honestly don't think the MBA is that slow, it's just slower than anything else apple make and is not their cheapest machine by quite some distance. Hence the comments about it being underpowered. For me it is perfect - I just want something that has a decent display and keyboard that is as light as possible. Bingo.

 

[manu chao]

I wouldn't worry. Look at the specs: You have a slightly faster CPU, slower HD, less RAM, better GPU.

Maybe we should redefine the meaning of HD to include SSDs?

 

[gnasher729]

Why doesn't someone build a notebook with a big, slow, crappy HDD and maybe 16GB of RAM? You load everything you need into RAM when you boot up. Any kind of smart software can keep track of which files you access frequently and automatically load them. This part is slow.

After that, you have the fastest "disk" in the world. You can shut down the HDD right after booting, so there's no power drain use at all until you shut down.

The problem is threefold: First, you don't know what is going to be needed (although with 16 GB you could just keep reading things in the background and even if you get half of it wrong, you should still be fine). But the problem is what happens when you write. You could easily do all the writes when the computer is shut down or put to sleep, but that means you have to do a lot of writes, possibly when you run out of battery power, and if the Mac doesn't manage to finish all the writes, you are in serious trouble! And the last problem is, RAM uses power permanently. 16 GB RAM would affect your battery life. Flash doesn't use any power at all when it is not in use.

 

[peterjeter26]

amazing speeds for tthe SSD might pick one up myself

 

[peterjeter26]

amazing speeds for the SSD might pick one up myself

 

[OS X Dude]

I wouldn't worry. Look at the specs: You have a slightly faster CPU, slower HD, less RAM, better GPU.

So some components are quicker, some are slower. I honestly don't think the MBA is that slow, it's just slower than anything else apple make and is not their cheapest machine by quite some distance. Hence the comments about it being underpowered. For me it is perfect - I just want something that has a decent display and keyboard that is as light as possible. Bingo.

Slightly worse GPU - i'm on GMA950 chipset (doesn't matter, for the primitive video work I do it's ample, and because the X3100 still can't run blockbuster games - which I use a PS3 for anyway - the fact MBA has better grfx card is a moot point.

So... a 7200 rpm drive and 2 GB RAM should raise this figure.... I wonder what stock 2GHz MB's clock at, to give me a rough figure of what I SHOULD be getting.... I will go check, and report back in case anyone else wanted to know or use it to compare MBA benchmarks with.

EDIT - Xbench.com says that 2GHz C2D MBs come in at an average of 97.40, so mine should hopefully reach 100 after my mods. BTW, Apple TV comes in at 101.20!!!!

 

[Tensakun]

Switching HD out with SSD?

I'm going for the 1.8 GHz because you can't upgrade that later. But I'll pass on the SSD until they get cheaper (and my warranty is out) at which time I plan to self-install a 64 or 128. (And SSD may even keep getting faster.)

Several others in the various threads have expressed this intention. In theory, sounds like a savvy plan. But has anyone confirmed that it's actually possible to replace the HD with SSD? Would Apple offer that option thru their stores? I suppose that if you did it yourself you could kiss your AppleCare goodbye, right?