Well “Ludwig”:http://www.theludwigs.com has one, so I have to have one too, the first solid state drive Macbook Air’s are arriving and the question is how do they perform. “Macrumors”:http://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/01/macbook-air-1-6ghz-hdd-vs-1-8gh-sdd-benchmarks/ shows that there is nothing too unexpected.
The CPU is pretty slow at 1.8GHz but is way faster than the pokey 4200 rpm 80GB hard drive at random uncached reads and writes. It should have better battery life than the 2.5 hours that folks are reporting, but no specific data on that. On random, 4K block reads and writes it is 7MBps/2.23MBps vs. 0.57Mbps/0.35MBps for the traditional hard drive. Both aren’t particularly fast, but that is a big difference! Now most hard drives have big caches, so the difference definitely shrinks in real usage.
“Gizmodo”:http://gizmodo.com/348733/first-macbook-air-benchmarks ran a benchmark set with the Macbook Air (1.6GHz, 2GB Ram, 80GB hard drive, 4200rpm HDD) against a Macbook (2GHz/1GB 667MHz DDR2 Ram, 120GB/5400 rpm HDD) and a Macbook Pro (2.2GHz, 2GB 667GGHz DDR2, 160GB, 5400 rpm hard drive):
| Test | MBA | MacBook | MacBook Pro |
| MP3 Encode | 3m14s | 3m51s | 3m40s |
| QT iPhone export | 1m13s | 1m11s | 48s |
| USB to Macbook | 35s | 33s | 29s |
| Duplicate Flash drive | 1m15s | 1m03s | 1m |
| Boot | 45s | 41s | 30s |
The interesting things is that it really isn’t that much slower. They also have raw “Xbench”:http://gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2008/01/macbook_air_xbench.txt results as well. Xbench for my Macbook Pro vs. MacBook Air are:
| Test | MBA | MacBook Pro |
| CPU | 80 | 107 |
| Memory | 159 | 151 |
| Graphics | 98 | 169 |
| UI | 104 | 216 |
| Disk Sequential | 43 | 27 |
| Disk Random | 17 | 24 |
In the above higher is better. I’m really unclear on the disk tests as you’d think a 5400rpm 160GB drive would do better
Powered by ScribeFire.
