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My first real experience with a MacBook Air/flash hard drive...wow


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My first real experience with a MacBook Air/flash hard drive...wow
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psmith2.0
Mr. Vieira
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Tennessee
 
2012-03-12, 11:46

I'm over in South Carolina (long story) and made it to a Best Buy Saturday afternoon. I played with the lowest-end MacBook Air (64GB, 2GB RAM, 11", 1.6GHz i5, etc.) and was astounded at just how responsive it was. I even selected about 10-12 apps and launched them and they all just popped up.

Is this due to the flash-based hard drive? It has to be, right? It was dramatic...

Which leads to my next question...do you think the next generation of major releases (the MacBook Pro, Mac mini and iMac) will go to this? Is price still the big hold-back on this sort of tech? I know Apple charges an arm and two legs to upgrade (and I realize the current iMac and MacBook Pro offerings have the option to BTO to a secondary flash-based drive).

Is it the capacityrice thing that's making it tough? iMacs are now going with 500GB-1TB drives, and to get that in flash-based storage would probably be about $8,000.

I'm currently using 100GB of a 320GB hard drive on my iMac. Therefore, I know I could be okay with "just" 256GB on my next go-around. I think it would be hard, after getting used to such a thing, ever going back to those spinning hard drives. I tried it on another MacBook Air and they were both so fast and responsive.

I've just never really paid attention...
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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2012-03-12, 11:53

Quote:
Originally Posted by pscates2.0 View Post
Is it the capacity : price thing that's making it tough?
Yes. An SSD is roughly 1$ per GB. Typically more; sometimes a little less. By comparison, a 2.5-inch hard drive is around 20¢ per GB, and a 3.5-inch one in some cases even half that.
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bassplayinMacFiend
Banging the Bottom End
 
Join Date: Jun 2004
 
2012-03-12, 12:19

512GB SSDs start around $700 and go up from there. I think I saw a 1TB SSD being advertised as "a bargain at only $1,300" LOL.
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Eugene
careful with axes
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Hillsborough, CA
 
2012-03-12, 15:33

Quote:
Originally Posted by bassplayinMacFiend View Post
512GB SSDs start around $700 and go up from there. I think I saw a 1TB SSD being advertised as "a bargain at only $1,300" LOL.
It's just that SSD development is at the point where the manufacturers can squeeze out every last dollar from you for both controller improvements and memory density.

A couple months ago, 240-256 GB SSDs were commanding a premium in $/GB, but I just bought two 256GB Samsung 830s for $289 each. Instead of buying one 512GB SSD with 500MB/s reads and 400MB/s writes, you can get two for less and stripe them with linear scaling.

Here's an AS-SSD benchmark of my new drives in a RAID 0.



In general SSD 'snappiness' is dependent on 4K random writes, something the SandForce drives in particular excel at. There's also the Vertex 4 coming out in the next couple of months using the Indilinx Everest 2 controller that should have even better 4K throughput.

Last edited by Eugene : 2012-03-12 at 15:59.
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Eugene
careful with axes
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Hillsborough, CA
 
2012-03-12, 17:41

Another thing about SSDs that ship with Macs. They come from Samsung or Toshiba drives and it's luck of the draw which one you get in a MacBook Air. If you get a Toshiba SSD like I did, it will be noticeably slower than one with a Samsung.

I'm not sure what causes slowdowns in my MacBook Air, but while browsing in Safari it can be very unresponsive while loading websites. The whole browser window will become unresponsive while I try to trackpad scroll through a still loading page. When the page finishes loading, it skips down to a random section because of all the scrolling action.
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hmurchison
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: LV 426
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2012-03-12, 20:04

The Sammy 830's are fast. I hope Apple uses them in the next MBP refresh.


When I got my Air...I took a breath and told myself not to get pissed if it had the Toshiba SSD in it because Air's can have their SSD upgraded. Phew ...it was a Samsung SSD.


For me I get a jerky cursor where it almost seems like a process halts the thread for the cursor and it'll just freeze for a bit and then resume. I hope it's just a software issue that'll be corrected in time.

That being said ....HDD...stick a fork in them as the sole storage device in a computer. I'd have no problem with future systems shipping with 64GB of SSD storage for the Boot Drive and applications and then let me click a preference setting that moves my Pictures/Movies/Music folder to the mass storage 5400rpm HDD.

Tiered storage is now ready and in many cases recommended for consumers as well.

omgwtfbbq
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