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MacBook Air with SSD has only Slight Speed Advantage

by , 2:25 PM EST, February 6th, 2008

The MacBook Air with a solid state drive (SSD) was compared to the hard disk drive (HHD) version. While the SSD was better in some respects, it was worse in others, and the net gain was not substantial, according to ars technica on Tuesday.

The key finding was that the SSD drive performed better in random access tasks where the physical head movement in the standard HDD is a detriment. The SSD also performed better in read performance. However, in sequential access and in writing, the SSD did worse than the HDD.

Ars technica wrote: "The overall disk test scores aren't much different—29.37 on the HDD and 34.30 on the Air. But the SSD performs a fair amount worse than the HDD model when it comes to sequential read and write tests. The SSD was able to write sequentially between 14.67 and 13.86MB/sec, and sequentially read between 7.29 and 49.59MB/sec (the first and second numbers are differentiated by the size of the blocks being written). Comparatively, the HDD model sequentially writes between 31.35 and 33.33MB/sec, and reads between 6.32 and 32.74MB/sec for the same-sized blocks.

"But the random disk test is where the SSD model outpaces the HDD. The SSD's overall random read/write score was more than 40 percent higher than that of the HDD. While the HDD model was writing 256k blocks at 22.95MB/sec, the SSD Air was writing at 19.04MB/sec. But read speeds are significantly faster, and the HDD model read the 256k blocks at 14.37MB/sec while the SSD read at 47.61MB/sec."

The speed comparisons were made not only between the MacBook Air with an HDD and one with SSD, but also compared to a standard MacBook and MacBook Pro which makes the comparisons even more useful.

While the SSD may not be a slam dunk in speed advantage over the standard HDD, it still has the advantage of lower power consumption and a greater resistance to vibration and shock. Boot up time is also reduced somewhat.

Observer Comments

Show: Subjects Only | Full Comments
Close Name:Guest
Subject:

Really?

Check out the benchmarks here:

http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/MacBook-Air.htm

Close Name:chicknfood Posts: 15 Joined: 13 May 2004
Subject: Where are my boot times?

i thought having flash ram and a flash hard disk we could eliminate boot times altogether? how far is this from happening?

Close Name:Mikuro Posts: 457 Joined: 15 Jun 2002
Subject:

Flash is nowhere NEAR as fast as RAM, so this will not happen in the foreseeable future.

If you look at the details of the MobileTechReview benchmarks and the ArsTechnica benchmarks, you'll see that they don't really contradict each other. MobileTechReview does not give the kinds of details as ArsTechnica; their numbers are averages of many tests, and if you average those same tests that ArsTechnica performed, you'll get similar numbers.

It seems to me like the performance of these is quite respectable. Being familiar with the technology's downsides, I was expecting worse.

Close Name:Guest
Subject: Performance comments true in some respects, not in others.

Though in this case the SSD was not much of a performance increase, it is because their requirement was space and not speed. A high performing SSD will by FAR run faster than an HDD. The problem is getting a fast SSD that is over 32GB, it gets very very expensive. However, 16GB SSD are available at affordable which have write times at ~100MB/S and read times at ~80MB/S (Mtron). That's 3 times the speed! Notice this performance increase is further truncated because the seek times are 1/100 those in an HDD. Conclusion: SSD Rules.

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