SSD speed too slow?

[odedia]

Hi,
I know that Apple sources its SSDs from many suppliers, but I've never seen results that were lower than 300mb write... I just bought a 13" 2014 Macbook Air (128gb), and here are the results:

Is this considered normal or should I take it back?

Thanks.

 

[Dweez]

Use the search function on this forum. It's been widely discussed that the smaller flash devices are slower than the larger devices. 128 is slower than 256 is slower than 512.

 

[motrek]

Hi,
I know that Apple sources its SSDs from many suppliers, but I've never seen results that were lower than 300mb write... I just bought a 13" 2014 Macbook Air (128gb), and here are the results:

Image

Is this considered normal or should I take it back?

Thanks.

Too slow for what? (Re: thread title.) That write speed, which is the weakest characteristic of SSDs, is already faster than the fastest hard drive.

 

[26139]

Too slow as compared to...

Um, if you've just switched to an SSD, it's the fastest drive you've ever likely to have used.

Is it broken in some way.

Also, as an aside, is it normal to run tests like this on new equipment? Can't say I've ever bothered to do so, unless something happened to make me think a part was broken. Am I in the minority?

 

[odedia]

I didn't just switch to an SSD, but that's not the point. People always run benchmarks on their new equipment for verification purposes. Why wait for until it is too late to return a product that might be defective in a few weeks/months?

 

[DeltaMac]

I didn't just switch to an SSD, but that's not the point. People always run benchmarks on their new equipment for verification purposes. ...

Oh really? First I've heard that people "always run benchmarks on their new equipment" - seems a little OCD to me 😀
The numbers in your test should not be a concern. As someone already mentioned, the smaller flash drives tend to be somewhat slower - although still much faster than spinning hard drives.

 

[chabig]

Your speed is normal.

 

[odedia]

Thanks everyone. The reason I asked was that I saw in every review of a 128gb Macbook Air a speed of AT LEAST 300mb/sec.

Turns out I was right and there was indeed something that was holding the speed back - I had File Vault turned on! (the default in yosemite).

Apperantly, the encryption really messes up the performance of your SSD. Here's a benchmark after disabling FileVault:

That's a 33% in increase in write speed! If you don't NEED File Vault, this is remarkable.

Oh really? First I've heard that people "always run benchmarks on their new equipment" - seems a little OCD to me 😀
The numbers in your test should not be a concern. As someone already mentioned, the smaller flash drives tend to be somewhat slower - although still much faster than spinning hard drives.

DeltaMac - it might be OCD but hey, it just made my SSD faster (and battery life better) 😀.

Thanks everyone for the help.

 

[motrek]

... Apperantly, the encryption really messes up the performance of your SSD. Here's a benchmark after disabling FileVault:
...
That's a 33% in increase in write speed! If you don't NEED File Vault, this is remarkable.
...
DeltaMac - it might be OCD but hey, it just made my SSD faster (and battery life better) 😀.

This post is so wrong-headed that I don't even know where to start.

First of all, your SSD didn't get any faster, obviously. It's the same SSD.

Second, FileVault wasn't "messing up" the performance... it encrypts everything that's written to the drive... of course this takes a non-trivial amount of processing power and thus makes things slower by a predictable and expected amount.

Third, going from 200 MB/s to 300 MB/s write speed is not "remarkable" unless you're someone who often writes multi-gigabyte amounts of data to his drive. If you write smaller files less frequently (this describes almost everybody) then the files are written to the file cache in RAM and then written to the drive essentially in the background. From your perspective there is literally no difference in performance.

Fourth, do you have any information on your drive that you don't want criminals to have access to? Because let's say you have FileVault turned off and somebody steals your MacBook. It's a simple process for them to remove the drive and access your files using another MacBook, if you're not using FileVault. So I guess it's up to you if the data on your laptop is so worthless that you don't mind other people seeing it, in exchange for a performance increase that is probably literally imperceptible to you (unless you're running this disk benchmark program).

 

[iizmoo]

FileVault can take a While to finish it thing, you probably just ran the test while it was still encrypting. Filevault once set up run pretty transparently. I've used my 2013 air a fair amount, and after more than a year, speed is still roughly the same, no real noticible slowdown in the benchmark that I could tell.

 

[Meister]

Thanks everyone. The reason I asked was that I saw in every review of a 128gb Macbook Air a speed of AT LEAST 300mb/sec.

Turns out I was right and there was indeed something that was holding the speed back - I had File Vault turned on! (the default in yosemite).

Apperantly, the encryption really messes up the performance of your SSD. Here's a benchmark after disabling FileVault:

Image

That's a 33% in increase in write speed! If you don't NEED File Vault, this is remarkable.



DeltaMac - it might be OCD but hey, it just made my SSD faster (and battery life better) 😀.

Thanks everyone for the help.

And here I go again:
Increasing the write speed is irrelevant for most users.
The main difference is the iops. Ssds perform magnitudes better than hdds in that regard.

BM speed test only shows r/w speeds and those only matter if you move large amounts of data.
What do you do that requires that?