So, how good is Air's Flash compared to X-25M?

[Dias]

Hi guys

I've MBP 13'' 2.5Ghz with X25M on it. Quite happy with the performance, needless to say, especially when I try other laptops with "old" HHD.

Now, I'm seriously considering selling it and get the new Air instead (I'm a student). I guess 13'' is good enough to be a main computer at this point, though I like 11'' mucho as well.

I was wondering how is that Flash memory inside behave compared to X-25M? Can anybody do some benchmarks?

Cheers

 

[J400uk]

There was a post somewhere on here that had brief benchmarks from the two and the MBA SSD was pretty close to the X25, can't find that thread though 🙁

EDIT: It was here - https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=11273455#post11273455

 

[barefeats]

I ran QuickBench 4 on the 128G flash storage of the 11" MacBook Air.

Large Sequential Transfers (20MB - 100MB blocks, 5 iterations)
READ 209MB/s, WRITE 193MB/s

Small Random Transfers (average of 4K to 1024K, 5 iterations)
READ 102MB/s, WRITE 96MB/s

Those numbers are two to four times faster than the fastest notebook HDD
but the best SSDs (OCZ Vertex 2, OWC Mercury Extreme) are 30% to 50% faster.

 

[Dias]

Not bad, actually. Thank you very much for the test. 🙂

 

[newdeal]

...

Is speed degradation an issue. Would hate to see everyone complaining in 6 months because they are starting to get beach balls

 

[All Taken]

Why would it cause 'beach balls'? 🙄

So the write speed may not be as quick after 6 months of use because of the SSD becoming full...

To me read speed is the real factor, 'beach balling' made me smile.

The more interesting question is this;

'Do the Apple SSD cards (Toshiba) include drive provisioning?'