MacBook Air HDD multitasking and shutdown times

[halogan]

Hi there,

I'm considering the Rev B MBA HDD (when it's out), but I'm worried about three things:
1) Does some heavy work hog the HDD and makes the laptop unusable? I'm talking about some transfers to USB drives, HD/SD video playback, ...

2) Everybody shows their bootup time on YouTube (55 sec is nothing to brag about), but I saw one shutdown time... and it took awfully long. I'm not about to reboot it often, but I don't want to wait a minute when I need to shut it down.

3) Is sleep instant? And how long does it take for the system to write 2 GB of RAM onto the hard drive?

Thank you all for any info. (I guess the difference between Rev A and B won't be that drastic)

 

[jimboutilier]

RevA

Hi there,

I'm considering the Rev B MBA HDD (when it's out), but I'm worried about three things:
1) Does some heavy work hog the HDD and makes the laptop unusable? I'm talking about some transfers to USB drives, HD/SD video playback, ...

2) Everybody shows their bootup time on YouTube (55 sec is nothing to brag about), but I saw one shutdown time... and it took awfully long. I'm not about to reboot it often, but I don't want to wait a minute when I need to shut it down.

3) Is sleep instant? And how long does it take for the system to write 2 GB of RAM onto the hard drive?

Thank you all for any info. (I guess the difference between Rev A and B won't be that drastic)

I have a lowly RevA 1.6/80 but...

1) Large file copies or heavy cpu/disk combinations like ripping a DVD were indeed an issue on my machine. When you do one of those things you don't get reasonable performance for other things going on at the same time. The new SATA interface on the REVB's should help here but 1.8" HDDs are pretty slow at their fastest and the SDDs will help a lot on reads but are often worse on writes.

2) About a minute is right for my boot time but it will vary by what you have in startup programs and an SDD should be considerably quicker. Shutdown times vary by what you have running and whats in caches - I've experienced times ranging from about 5 seconds to almost 30.

3) Safe Sleep (your Mac's default that writes memory to disk first) takes a few seconds. Using a utility like SmartSleep you can make it instant. Wake up is pretty much instant.