Buying 2013 MacBook Air

[phitcharkorn]

I'm planning to buy the 13" macbook air 2013 model.(my first mac)
I decide to have 8gb of ram and i5 processor.But I don't know how many flash storage I will use.I am using the windows and use about 150 gb of flash storage.
I know that 256 gb is better but it's a lot more expensive so is it different if I buy 128gb and add the 128 gb of sdxc card.I install a lot of programs but I don't have a lot of music, video and photo.If I buy the 128gb one I can save the money to buy a lot of accessories.

 

[old-wiz]

I wouldn't depend on the sdxc card for frequent use.

 

[Boyd01]

The SD card will be vastly slower than the internal SSD. The 128GB SSD has write speeds in the 300 to 400 MB/s range and the card is probably around 50 MB/s.

Might be OK for some things, but not really a substitute for the internal SSD.

 

[Dweez]

If it were me I'd spend the extra $200 on the larger internal storage option.

As has been stated, an SD card is a decent option for some things but it's very slow in comparison to internal storage. I use an SD card in mine to store things which I use infrequently, such as movies and music.

I've got the 512 gig option in my MBA, so the read & write performance may be better than the 256 gig device. Using the black magic disk speed test I get in excess of 700 meg/second reads & writes on the SSD, while seeing 55-60 meg/sec writes and 85-90 meg/sec writes on the PNY StorEDGE card, exfat formatted.

 

[Boyd01]

while seeing 55-60 meg/sec writes and 85-90 meg/sec writes on the PNY StorEDGE card, exfat formatted.

Do you mean 85-90 MB/s reads?

 

[joema2]

See attached SSD vs SDXC test results on my 2013 MBA. This is using a 64GB Sandisk Extreme Pro SDXC Class 10 UHS-1 card, formatted exFAT in the MBA -- I don't know why QuickBench reports it as "unknown type", Finder shows it exFAT.

The internal SSD is about 8.5 times faster (778 megabytes/sec vs 91 megabytes/sec). The difference is roughly the same for both read and write.

91 MB/sec is pretty fast for data transfer, but you don't want to use that in place of the SSD, which has a PCIe interface.

MacBook Air specs: 2013 MBA, 1.7Ghz i7, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD.

 

[scaredpoet]

If you're concerned about storage and are already using 150GB on your current setup, then I would strongly recommend getting the 256MB, if not more.

using an SD card for things like temp scratch space and for storing documents works well enough, but I wouldn't rely on it at all to store additional software. The slowness will DEFINITELY be felt. Not to mention, it's far cheaper storage and probably won't last as long before you start having problems with it, if you plan on using it as primary storage.

 

[Dweez]

Do you mean 85-90 MB/s reads?

Why yes - yes I do.