Friday, February 8th 2008
MacBook Air Does Not See Much Benefit From SSD Drive
The new MacBook boasts a lot of features. Among them is one of the first attempts to put a beefy SSD into a mass-produced computer. MacBook customers have a choice between an 80GB 4300RPM drive, and a 64GB SSD. The SSD costs a whopping $1300, but some would claim that the price is well worth it. Unfortunately for SSD promoters, a little bit of investigative journalism uncovered an inconvenient truth. ARS Technica took two MacBook Airs, one with an SSD and one without, and compared the two in modern benchmarks. What they found was quite surprising: it's not worth the $1300 most of the time. While the SSD definitely eliminated hard drive lag in extremely bandwidth-heavy applications and made the overall system much smoother, it all comes down to what you're using it for. Despite the possible performance gains, ARS Techica concluded that you really shouldn't be spending $1300 on this technology just yet.
Source:
Nordic Hardware
6 Comments on MacBook Air Does Not See Much Benefit From SSD Drive
Apple does have a history of being a little too quick to adopt new technologies.
I remember years ago with the first iMac battling to find anything that would work with usb.
Then they are cheaper, larger, faster, stronger, harder, better, faster, work it, make it, do it!
:D (Daft SSD)
Both HDD options in the Air suck. Either a slower-than-dirt HDD with only 80Gb of storage, or a cost-of-an-entire-rig SSD HDD with only minimal performance gains with even les storage capacity. Wooo...
Yes, it was a pain at first, but then a whole host of things started coming out, once companies realised that people really really wanted the iMac for its looks, but had nothing to use on it, in terms of external add-ons.
Also, the HDD is slow, yes, but since it's tiny, it can kinda be excused I think. For most of the people that will use the Air, 4300RPM is just fine. With a nice amount of RAM, they can just have more open at once. OS X is pretty good at managing memory, afaik, so it shouldn't affect performance so much after everything has loaded properly into memory.