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

SSD Speed Variations in 2014 MacBook Air Still Due to Drive Brand Mix, Not Broader Changes

tommyminahan said:
Thats dumb..

That's like saying, my 2008 MacBook Pro had 24bit color, and the new one has 24bit color.. Its exactly the same, why upgrade??
Click to expand...

Nope, that's not the same at all, and not at all what I'm saying. Because—as I pointed out in my first post on the subject, on this same thread—it's ONE evidence. One among many. As I said, it's further evidence. There are others: performance tests attesting that speed is about the same for both '13 and '14 models.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The Mercurian said:
I'm wondering if they were just conservative advertising the battery life in 2013, and are being more accurate now ? Or is there a difference someone can measure ? It is possible they made minor tweaks to improve efficiency somehow I suppose
Click to expand...
Apple puts the special sauce into the latest OS X builds. The fun thing is that you can take a build from a brand new machine and try it out on an older sibling machine. Though it might just be as simple as being conservative on the estimates in 2013 as you mentioned.
 
Did anybody actually bother to read the macworld article?

Everybody just seems to be commenting blindly on that test image of the same brand drive year over year with minuscule differences, and flailing around about who has the best SSD.

The macworld article showed differences of 25 secs to 150 secs on simple write tests. One drive to another was anywhere from 50% slower over 100% and 200% slower! That's not insignificant. You may still have 200+ MB/s and be way faster etc than HDD, but the point is:

Why should an older portable mac's SSD be twice as fast as the one in the next one you buy?

I don't buy the argument that smaller SSDs are slower than bigger ones.
You pay the Apple premium, you expect consistency in quality & speed. Regardless of brand the read & write speed should be spec'd and hit that minimum level.

What's next? Oh your CPU in your new laptop despite being an upgrade, is 50-200% slower but you won't notice it in real life? Really?
 
icerabbit said:
I don't buy the argument that smaller SSDs are slower than bigger ones.
Click to expand...

You must know something that engineers don't know then. Since it's been known for a very long time that larger SSD's outperform smaller SSD's due to the fact that large SSD's have more parallelism. More parallelism = greater speed. There is a pretty big performance difference between a 128GB SSD and a 512GB SSD of the same brand.
 
polterbyte said:
The drive performance being exactly the same (albeit excellent, as you pointed out) IS evidence that upgrading from the 2013 model to the 2014 model does not make sense from a performance standpoint.

Why would it make sense to upgrade form the MBA late 2013 to the MBA 2014 if, as you yourself adequately state that "nothing has changed"?
Click to expand...

why would it make sense to upgrade pretty much anything from a late 2013 model to an early 2014?

(unless, maybe, we're talking about a jar of jelly or smthng)
 
DTphonehome said:
I don't understand why Apple can't mandate a certain level of performance from suppliers.

Or, maybe they do, and some drives are faster than the minimum required speed?
Click to expand...

They do. The Sandisk drive meets the minimum and the Samsung exceeds it.

----------
icerabbit said:
Did anybody actually bother to read the macworld article?

Everybody just seems to be commenting blindly on that test image of the same brand drive year over year with minuscule differences, and flailing around about who has the best SSD.

The macworld article showed differences of 25 secs to 150 secs on simple write tests. One drive to another was anywhere from 50% slower over 100% and 200% slower! That's not insignificant. You may still have 200+ MB/s and be way faster etc than HDD, but the point is:

Why should an older portable mac's SSD be twice as fast as the one in the next one you buy?

I don't buy the argument that smaller SSDs are slower than bigger ones.
You pay the Apple premium, you expect consistency in quality & speed. Regardless of brand the read & write speed should be spec'd and hit that minimum level.

What's next? Oh your CPU in your new laptop despite being an upgrade, is 50-200% slower but you won't notice it in real life? Really?
Click to expand...

It's the SSD lottery. If Macworld had gotten a 2013 with a Sandisk and a 2014 with a Samsung they'd be writing about how much speedier the 2014 was. In reality it's always been a crapshoot. Samsung make some of the best SSDs out there but Apple likes to have multiple suppliers, particularly since they've been suing Samsung for about 3 years now.
 
The new 2014 Air is tested out at roughly 10% faster on 802AC wifi

and its $100 off.


However some of you need to make note that online MAC sellers are clearing out "old" 2013 models for insane prices!!!!

I snagged an 11" 2013 with 256SSD and 8GB RAM for $1099
 
flat five said:
why would it make sense to upgrade pretty much anything from a late 2013 model to an early 2014?

(unless, maybe, we're talking about a jar of jelly or smthng)
Click to expand...

Yeah, like nobody ever upgrades their iPhones year-over-year, right? I mean, who has ever hear of anyone upgrading, say, an iPhone 3GS to an iPhone 4 back in 2010, or an iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5 back in 2012. Pft! Nuts, I say! Except that Apple customers did that in droves.

It does make sense to several people to upgrade from one model to the one immediately following, but only when the right incentives (speed, technology, design, etc.) are present. All I'm saying is that in this case that's not worth it from a performance standpoint.

If you can only see the sense in such yoy upgrades for "a jar of jelly or smthng [sic]", well, it it flies your kite, go for it, I guess.
 
realeric said:
Samsung's SSD is a junk. It's fast but they use TLC; cheap and weak.
Click to expand...

********. Samsung's PCIe SSDs are based on the MLC XP941.

The 840 Pro also uses MLC.

If Samsung's SSD is junk, why does the SM0256F have write speeds that are 150MB/s faster than that of the SD0256F? And why is it that Samsung ones have higher IOPS/random ops performance?

----------
KPOM said:
It's the SSD lottery. If Macworld had gotten a 2013 with a Sandisk and a 2014 with a Samsung they'd be writing about how much speedier the 2014 was. In reality it's always been a crapshoot. Samsung make some of the best SSDs out there but Apple likes to have multiple suppliers, particularly since they've been suing Samsung for about 3 years now.
Click to expand...

This is why I went for the 512GB and 1TB variants in my 13" and 15" RMBPs, just for the sake of avoiding the SD/SM lottery.

On my 21.5" iMac, I was lucky to get the SM0256F, which showed 670 MB/s in writes and 720 MB/s in reads. Not too far behind the SM0512F and way ahead of the SD0256F.
 
DesterWallaboo said:
You must know something that engineers don't know then. Since it's been known for a very long time that larger SSD's outperform smaller SSD's due to the fact that large SSD's have more parallelism. More parallelism = greater speed. There is a pretty big performance difference between a 128GB SSD and a 512GB SSD of the same brand.
Click to expand...

What you say is true but did you look at the Macworld story? It shows the 2014 13" model with the larger (Sandisk?) ssd being slower than the 2013 13" model with the smaller (samsung?) ssd in copy, unzip and zip operatons.

Lesson? Samsung FTW. Anyone looking to get a macbook air today would be best served to get the 2013 model with the Samsung ssd because performance is almost the same but cheaper than the 2014 model. Ssd lottery ftl.
 
Wow, this article (and it's accompanying image) sure confused the hell out of readers.
Great job M.R.
 
bbbb4b said:
Wow, this article (and it's accompanying image) sure confused the hell out of readers.
Great job M.R.
Click to expand...

haha..
maybe they should of wrote:


A recent (click me)study by Macworld(click me) demonstrated rather dramatic differences in SSD read and write speeds between tested 2013 and 2014 models...



..probably would make more sense to readers seeing this fresh but oh well, it's sorta more funny this way :)
 
Populus said:
It would be nice, by reading the serial number, to know if you are the "lucky" owner of a SanDisk drive...
Click to expand...

The iOS fan boys will take slower performance just to avoid Samsung. Really shows the difference between true Mac fans and the new Apple fan boys.
 
This article is a little misleading. Although the 2014 and 2013 macbook air will perform the same with the same brand ssds in it, who is to say that Apple is still using faster brand ssds like samsung's. I have yet to see an article that clearly shows a fast 2014 macbook air.
 
Variant said:
The iOS fan boys will take slower performance just to avoid Samsung. Really shows the difference between true Mac fans and the new Apple fan boys.
Click to expand...

Thanks, i'd just take the fastest one, regardless of wich brand it is.
In fact, the Samsung chips are usually great quality ones. Look at the A5-A6-A7 microchips, or the Samsung SSDs.

By the way, I own a great Samsung TV too. My MacBook Pro looks amazing on it :)
 
Populus said:
Thanks, i'd just take the fastest one, regardless of wich brand it is.
In fact, the Samsung chips are usually great quality ones. Look at the A5-A6-A7 microchips, or the Samsung SSDs.

By the way, I own a great Samsung TV too. My MacBook Pro looks amazing on it :)
Click to expand...

My 2011 Air has the Samsung display and SSD. I believe there were issues with the other suppliers when I purchased mine. It was like winning the lottery when I got both components supplied by Samsung! :D :apple:
 
WTF!

Are you guys bored or dumb ... that kind of "news" just for "news", totally stupid.
 
Consumers always have a right to return within given time. This lottery won't go any where until Apple gets the message. In reality, most won't care about/notice this discrepancy.
 
procrastinasn said:
If people are seriously disappointed at +/- 5 MB/s when speeds are 700MB/s+.. there are some other serious issues..
Click to expand...

My sentiments exactly. The fact that Apple can ship a unit with slower performance and there is lack of a market issue shows we are approaching a maturity of the technology and customer base.

There will always be hard-cores that benchmark everything like automotive gear-heads. But who has the money to make a difference?
 
69Mustang said:
Testing a Sandisk v Sandisk only proves the Sandisk speed stayed virtually the same. I would like to see a test with comparable 2013 and 2014 models with SSD's from Sandisk, Toshiba, and Samsung. Only then will we have a better indication if there is really an issue. This test and the one from MacWorld with mixed drive capacities only serve to confuse rather than elucidate.
Click to expand...

Thank you for reiterating the article you didn't read.

----------
Fuchal said:
My poor rMBP :( Those new flash drives are sexy.
Click to expand...

You're kidding right? Because you're looking at thunderbolt raid 5 speeds from your little macbook there. You could edit just about any RAW 4k video right off your laptop.

----------
The Mercurian said:
You both need to read the news story again.

To save you time - nothing has changed. The drive performance is exactly the same as the 2013 model - i.e. awesome!!! It is affected by brand of drive regardless of year of MBA model. One brand is a bit less awesome than the others. That is all.

:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Not only did they not read the article, they didn't even read the post!
 
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