The Mac Observer

Skip navigational links

You're viewing an article in TMO's historic archive vault. Here, we've preserved the comments and how the site looked along with the article. Use this link to view the article on our current site:
MacBook Air with SSD has only Slight Speed Advantage

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.

Comment on this Article


You cannot edit your comments.   You cannot delete your comments.

Comments are currently closed. Please email the author instead.


Recent Headlines - Updated November 20th

Fri, 7:07 PM
Games - Soccer Sim Championship Manager 2010 Released for Mac
6:47 PM
Games - EA Publishes Original Monopoly for iPhone
6:15 PM
News - Original Apple I on Ebay for $50K, w/Letter from Steve Jobs
6:11 PM
Games - New iPhone Games: Secret of the Lost Cavern Ep 1, New DJ Nights, More
5:47 PM
Games - Star Trek D-A-C Game Headed to the Mac Next Month
4:57 PM
Product News - TidBITS Releases “Take Control of Syncing Data in Snow Leopard”
4:26 PM
John Martellaro's Blog - Particle Debris (week ending 11/20) Stationery Pads Go Poof
2:59 PM
Free on iTunes - Musée du Louvre, Art Lite, SketchBook Mobile X and More.
1:50 PM
Deal Brothers - Acer P215H bmid 21.5” Widescreen LCD Monitor:  $139.99
11:24 AM
TMO Appearances - Jeff Gamet Shares More Holiday Gift Ideas on MacJury
10:43 AM
Product News - Cocktail 4.5 for Leopard Adds QuickLook Cache Clearing
10:06 AM
News - Hack Enables Mac OS X 10.6.2 on Netbooks

The Mac Observer Reader Specials

  • TypeStyler For Mac OS X is Now Shipping! Download The Free Fully Functional 60 Day Tryout at www.typestyler.com
  • RamJet Memory: Mac Pro 8-core 8GB Kit $249.99, 4GB Kits $149.99! Sale on MacBook and MacBook Pro 8GB kits $497.99! New MacBook DDR3 4GB for $109.99. iMac and Mac mini 4GB Kits for $109.99! 1TB SATA Hard Drives for $109.99! Click here
  • OWC: Mercury On-The-Go FW800+USB2 up to 1.0TB. Bus Powered, no external power supply needed. Macworld ‘EditorÂ’s ChoiceÂ’, CNET ‘Very GoodÂ’ Starting from $99.97, 500GB $159.99. Click here
  • Poker Mac If you're using a Mac, then you've gotta check out Full Tilt Poker for Mac. This Full Tilt Poker bonus code does the unthinkable, it actually rewards!
  • For the latest Apple products use Ciao, a price comparison website, to find laptops like MacBook Air. Then find the best prices on MP3 players and use our comparison tool to evaluate mobile phones like the Apple iPhone.

  • Laptop Hardware Provided by TechRestore - Overnight Mac & iPod Repairs.
  • __________
  • Buy Stuff, Support TMO!
  • Podcast: Mac Geek Gab
  • Podcast: Apple Weekly Report
  • TMO on Twitter!