Benchmarks: MacBook Air hard drive vs. solid state
- February 2nd, 2008
- Read 7569 times
- 5 Comments
From this guy’s Flickr
The MacBook Air is finding its way into wanting hands and some early benchmarks have been tallied. There’s two main differences between the two default MacBook Airs you can buy—a 1.6GHz vs. 1.8GHz processor and an 80GB hard drive vs. a 64GB solid state drive. The price difference may be $999; it’s up to you whether or not the following differences are worth that to you.
CPU performance in the 1.8GHz model is marginally better than the 1.6GHz. I doubt you expected 200MHz to matter much, anyway. But it’s the hard drive vs. solid state comparison that people were most interested in.
Sequential file writing—loading big files into RAM—is a slightly slower affair with the solid state drive. Non-sequential writing, on the other hand, is a different story.
In non-sequential writing, a hard drive would be spinning all over the place, trying to locate spread-about files all over the different platters. Not so in a solid state drive. Thanks to the lack of moving parts, the solid state drive is noticeably faster. This here graph shows the actual numbers.
So there you have it.
MacBook Air 1.6Ghz HDD vs 1.8Ghz SSD Benchmarks [MacRumors]
I believe you mean sequential file *reading*. Files are not loaded into RAM when *writing* them. They are already loaded and being written *from* RAM to the drive. Likewise, with file-writing, the files can be written wherever there is space. It may or may not be non-sequential.
How about a source where you got this info from. I know where, but you make no mention of it. Give credit where it is do!
we link to macrumors. where did they get it?
Good point. All to often people take the works of others and represent it as thier own.
How about battery life? I’m assuming it will be noticably better with the SSD, however I would like to see actual data on that, if possible. Thanks.