Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

MacBook Air: SSD vs HDD

B

bpreles

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 15, 2007
2
0
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/06/macbook-air-ssd-vs-hdd/
That's what I was worried about. Battery life. I've heard less than good marks on that so far.
 
Very thorough reviews.

I'm still happy I got the SSD model, though, for one main reason: No more drive crashes. Even though I keep rigorous backups of my data, I've suffered through several HD crashes in my life, and it's painful every time. Switching to SSD will hopefully eliminate (or reduce substantially) that problem for me. Sure, the SSD is a lot of extra coin right now, but prices will come down...

And I'm used to being on the bleeding edge, anyway. It's good geek cred to have the SSD. ;)
 
MacBook Air: SSD vs HDD



ArsTechnica compares the Solid State Drive (SSD) and Hard Disk Drive (HDD) versions of the MacBook Air to see if the SSD upgrade is worth the additional cost.

Their benchmark results are consistent with earlier benchmarks revealing that the SSD drive is slower at writing and sequential reads than the HDD. The SSD, however, is faster than the HDD at random (non-sequential) disk access.

This difference shows itself in "real world" test such as Exporting a 60MB Quicktime, Compiling an Application or Unzipping an archive. As expected, the large file export, which performs a large sequential write to disk favored the HDD model. Meanwhile, building Webkit and Unzipping an archive showed off the speed advantage of the SSD.

Ars also looked at battery life of the MacBook Air and in their HDD review found that their Air averaged a paltry 2.5 hour battery life in their "real world tests". Questions on the validity of these results have been raised, with other anecdotal claims of battery life as long as 4-5 hours on the same configuration. Indeed, reports are varied:

Forums: 56% left after 2:15, 5+ hours?; Engadget: 2:25 watching movie, 3:35 light usage

Ars, however, is pretty confident in their battery life tests for their machine and felt it was consistent with some other reports. They found that the SSD didn't seem to offer a significant longer battery life (on average), however, their battery tests were not standardized.

In the end, they felt the SSD upgrade was not worth the additional cost ($999), but noted the biggest advantage of the SSD was a lack of disk-access related slowdowns that they experienced on the HDD model.

Article Link
 
So why not have both?

Perhaps what this shows is that a larger footprint laptop (say the next MBP) could usefully use both SSD and HDD. Use a small capacity SSD for the OS and a large capacity HDD for storage...
 
battery life tests are annoyingly inconsistent.

There needs to be a "standard" battery suite that runs, and you let it run until the battery is drained. This is of no help by itself... but at least you could run it against many different machines to get a sense of relative battery life.

arn
 
Would this be altered by going to a larger form factor 2.5" and SATA rather than PATA. i.e. for the MB and MBPs.
 
Let me be the first to say it in this thread, before anyone beats me to it : who cares about the air, where the hell is that Macbook Pro ? :D:p

Seriously, this is no news : everyone knows by now that writing to flash media is slower than writing to a normal hard drive. I however do not really doubt Arstechnica's results, they have a pretty solid reputation when it comes to reviewing.
 
xUKHCx said:
Would this be altered by going to a larger form factor 2.5" and SATA rather than PATA. i.e. for the MB and MBPs.
Click to expand...

The 2.5" drives are doing to be different SSD. It seems SSD varies depending on who you buy it from. MacLife did a SSD benchmark on a $725 32GB 2.5" SSD drive in a MacBook Pro.

http://www.maclife.com/article/dv_nation_mtron_32gb_sata_ssd

The SSD Mac was 50 percent faster in our Photoshop CS3 Action test, 33 percent faster when exporting a GarageBand track to iTunes, 57 percent faster when creating a PDF in Adobe InDesign, and 171 percent faster when adding 196 JPEGs to iPhoto. Any task that would spin the hard drive platters in a normal Mac is crazy fast in an SSD-equipped Mac—booting was 148 percent faster than on the normal MacBook Pro, and launching Photoshop CS3 was 229 percent faster. Flash memory is easier on the battery—the SSD Mac lasted 3 hours and 14 minutes doing normal office tasks, a 14 percent gain.
Click to expand...
 
yeah, to me, just doesn't sound like the $1000 isn't worth it . . . glad there's a new option that is finally making it in that has benefits, but as of now . . . until price comes down and capacity goes up, HDD still seems more worth it to me.
 
ts1973 said:
I however do not really doubt Arstechnica's results, they have a pretty solid reputation when it comes to reviewing.
Click to expand...

I don't doubt that they got those times on their laptop. I just don't know if you can apply that to your own life and a purchasing decision regarding the Air.

arn
 
arn said:
The 2.5" drives are doing to be different SSD. It seems SSD varies depending on who you buy it from. MacLife did a SSD benchmark on a $725 32GB 2.5" SSD drive in a MacBook Pro.

http://www.maclife.com/article/dv_nation_mtron_32gb_sata_ssd
Click to expand...

Oh thats good to know because I saw these earlier and thought that moving to SSD on my MB would not really be worth it, not that im considering this for a least a year due to price and by then i'm sure the tech will have matured to give faster results probably for less battery power as well.
 
In my opinion, it's just not fiscally responsible to purchase the MBA with the SSD at this time. The writing is on the wall that SSD drives are the wave of the future for OS and application-level access, but the price premium at this point in time is just not worth the benefit.

For those who are contemplating an MBA with the SSD but have "sticker shock" so much so that they have not pulled the trigger, I say wait. I suspect (and this is my opinion only) that in 6-8 months time we'll see the prices begin to come down. This time next year they should be priced more reasonably.
 
$1000 for that upgrade was a stretch to begin with - never thought it was worth it personally for the little you get - price needs to come down on SSD before it is a real option.
 
I saw the MBA for the first time last night and compared the boot times. The HDD took about 60 seconds longer to boot than the SSD. I don't think the $1K is worth the upgrade. However, IF I needed a MBA now, I would strongly consider it.
 
Yeah, SSDs are nice but they aren't worth the cost just yet, in my opinion. I'm getting more than 2.5 hours on my Macbook air for battery life. So beats me about that.
 
I think the consensus is definitely that it's wiser to wait till they can get a faster, hopefully cheaper SSD into the MBA. Could be awhile.

I dunno, though. If you have money coming out the wazoo, you really might as well. It's not going to save the world, but it sounds like it would save you a lot of irritation if you do much file transfer (like Firefox, backup, etc.).
 
The price difference is huge. I wonder what percentage of new MBA's have SSD vs HDD. I would imagine it is quite low.
 
Lord Sam said:
Wow. Maybe Apple will lower the price of upgrade.
Click to expand...

Doubtful since that's about what others are charging for the same thing (if not more). Prices will come down when the apple's cost from the manufacturer comes down.

Besides speed, are there other benefits? Weight? Heat?

At the very least, I'd be less worried about hard drive failure from moving the computer around. The HD based ipods seem to have a much much higher failure rate than the flash based models.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back