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MacBook Air 1.6Ghz HDD vs 1.8Ghz SSD Benchmarks
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Funny thing is, I was initially going to write "I think you're seeing what you want to see in that review".
Like I said, it's a less than enthusiastic review. And it is. I would say it's an average review, and I don't see how anyone could argue it's a positive review as there is plenty of criticism in it.
Funny thing is, I was initially going to write "I think you're seeing what you want to see in that review".
Like I said, it's a less than enthusiastic review. And it is. I would say it's an average review, and I don't see how anyone could argue it's a positive review as there is plenty of criticism in it.
Look, the MacBook Air isn't for everyone, which is what she says. That isn't "less than positive", that's just what it is. She also obviously likes it a lot for what it is and sees it fitting in her life very well. So do I. If it doesn't fit your needs, she defines pretty well why. None of us who are buying the MBA care that it doesn't have ports-galore or performance like a MacBook Pro. We don't expect that, and neither did she.
comparison with sxs flash card
I've run xbench test for sxs card from sony on mbp , to compare numbers, see for yourself, note that this is very expensive flash card used in new sony cameras for example, which fits into expresscard slot. Now I'll want one as secondary fast drive for mbp , just if they were not so expensive , I don't know if they made 32 GB model yet, test was made on 8 GB model.
Sequential:
uncached write 27.94 MB/s 4k blocks
uncached write 38.39 MB/s 256k blocks
uncached read 7.74 MB/s 4k blocks
uncached read 73.36 MB/s 256k blocks
Random:
uncached write 0.07 MB/s 4k blocks *
uncached write 4.34 MB/s 256k blocks
uncached read 6.88 MB/s 4k blocks
unached read 72.21 MB/s 256k blocks
* Does this situation ever happen with good applications in real life ?
the screenshot is from the second run
I've run xbench test for sxs card from sony on mbp , to compare numbers, see for yourself, note that this is very expensive flash card used in new sony cameras for example, which fits into expresscard slot. Now I'll want one as secondary fast drive for mbp , just if they were not so expensive
, I don't know if they made 32 GB model yet, test was made on 8 GB model.Sequential:
uncached write 27.94 MB/s 4k blocks
uncached write 38.39 MB/s 256k blocks
uncached read 7.74 MB/s 4k blocks
uncached read 73.36 MB/s 256k blocks
Random:
uncached write 0.07 MB/s 4k blocks *
uncached write 4.34 MB/s 256k blocks
uncached read 6.88 MB/s 4k blocks
unached read 72.21 MB/s 256k blocks
* Does this situation ever happen with good applications in real life ?
the screenshot is from the second run
Attachments
Funny thing is, I was initially going to write "I think you're seeing what you want to see in that review".
Like I said, it's a less than enthusiastic review. And it is. I would say it's an average review, and I don't see how anyone could argue it's a positive review as there is plenty of criticism in it.
Don't mind netdog, mild buyer's remorse is creeping in and he's clearly feeling the strain.
If only people could be happy with their impractical, foolish purchases, we'd all get along so much better.
Whatever.
The article concludes with...
I think her decision to keep it and use it as her notebook from here on out says it all.
* Does this situation ever happen with good applications in real life ?
yes, it does.
Transaction logging often uses small writes, and so do many other meta-data operations (updating last access time on a file, for example, or creating a file and adding it to a directory). Not only are these common and small, they're typically flushed to disk quickly rather than being cached.
Indices and databases use small updates (spotlight, or mail).
Reliability issue
The measurements, observations, opinions, etc. people have stated here regarding the speed of the SSD in the MBA, even though it's not top of the line, seem to show that overall, the speed is often faster than the speed of the MBA's hard drive option. Some operations are slower, like shutdown, possibly when a lot of stuff is getting flushed back to the hard drive, or whatever time-consuming stuff OS X does at shutdown. But we're not shutting down very often.
Point is, the overall speed of the MBA's SSD seems to be OK, and in many cases better than the hard drive option. So that issue is now established. No need to beat it into the ground.
So, though the original point of this thread was to compare the speed of the two drive options, we can now look at other comparisons between the two. The other main aspect is reliability: theoretically, an SSD will be more reliable than a mechanical hard drive. In 23 years of fixing Macs, I've personally replaced hundreds and hundreds of hard drives, and it's always a pain to see the user lose their data (though luckily most of the drive replacements I've done, are of drives that are still running well enough to recover the data).
Though manufacturers have improved their reliability greatly, mechanical hard drives are, generally, too often still pieces of junk, too delicate, subject to breaking when dropped, etc. I think manufacturers could make them even more reliable, but if so, they're not getting there fast enough. Either there's some sort of reliability limit with mechanical drive design (I doubt it, though the manufacturers would probably like us to believe that), or manufacturers don't care enough, or they deliberately aren't improving their reliability much further, since a broken drive means they get to sell another drive--even if you don't buy one of theirs again, someone else will, who bought some other manufacturer's drive.
We have yet to see how reliable SSDs will be over time, but if the manufacturers aren't slobs, then we may see far fewer SSDs fail than hard drives. At least, when you drop a portable that contains an SSD, it isn't likely the fall will break the SSD, which is saying a lot. I'd feel a lot more comfortable carrying around a MBA that contains an SSD, than a hard drive.
The measurements, observations, opinions, etc. people have stated here regarding the speed of the SSD in the MBA, even though it's not top of the line, seem to show that overall, the speed is often faster than the speed of the MBA's hard drive option. Some operations are slower, like shutdown, possibly when a lot of stuff is getting flushed back to the hard drive, or whatever time-consuming stuff OS X does at shutdown. But we're not shutting down very often.
Point is, the overall speed of the MBA's SSD seems to be OK, and in many cases better than the hard drive option. So that issue is now established. No need to beat it into the ground.
So, though the original point of this thread was to compare the speed of the two drive options, we can now look at other comparisons between the two. The other main aspect is reliability: theoretically, an SSD will be more reliable than a mechanical hard drive. In 23 years of fixing Macs, I've personally replaced hundreds and hundreds of hard drives, and it's always a pain to see the user lose their data (though luckily most of the drive replacements I've done, are of drives that are still running well enough to recover the data).
Though manufacturers have improved their reliability greatly, mechanical hard drives are, generally, too often still pieces of junk, too delicate, subject to breaking when dropped, etc. I think manufacturers could make them even more reliable, but if so, they're not getting there fast enough. Either there's some sort of reliability limit with mechanical drive design (I doubt it, though the manufacturers would probably like us to believe that), or manufacturers don't care enough, or they deliberately aren't improving their reliability much further, since a broken drive means they get to sell another drive--even if you don't buy one of theirs again, someone else will, who bought some other manufacturer's drive.
We have yet to see how reliable SSDs will be over time, but if the manufacturers aren't slobs, then we may see far fewer SSDs fail than hard drives. At least, when you drop a portable that contains an SSD, it isn't likely the fall will break the SSD, which is saying a lot. I'd feel a lot more comfortable carrying around a MBA that contains an SSD, than a hard drive.