Macbook air 128GB SSD, true capacity?

I think we're way past done. I've given you as academic of an explanation as possible of why the phenomenon which occurs, does in fact occur. It's not necessary for you to accept as true either the phenomenon itself, or the explanation, but I do hope that others find this information useful.

 

wow I cant believe how much has happened in this topic since I left it. SSD changes everything I had the 1.6ghz air C2D and with that SSD it felt faster than 2,500 dollar falcon northwest I used with mechanical drive. (for my needs, again not encoding or gaming) To me the 13" pro is dead at this point.

-screen res unacceptable for 2012
- glass panel adds extreme glare, which the air does not have.
- 5400RPM drive, mechnical , adding a new one with decent size would bring me at the price of the maced out i5 13".
- the XT only has 4gb ssd mem, my goal is to have EVERYTHING on the fast drive
- optical drive is dead, I do rip CDS monthly but Ill buy a $12 dollar external one and save the 1.5 pounds in weight. I would never take the drive out of the house anyway.

I am pretty much set on the old model. 256GB SSD is unheard of for 1150. I could care less about the CPU power if I am getting a mechincal drive which has been the main bottleneck for me for years.

 

It not only feels faster but it has been proven that the Sandy Bridge setup in the mid-2011 MBAs blows the C2D processors (even the highest end one) in the 2010 MBAs out of the water. There is no point in arguing about that since it is a fact. You would have better luck trying to argue with a brick wall that 2 + 2 = 5.

Not instantaneously but within a matter of seconds. Most programs load in ~4 seconds and any additional, small program related files take less than a second. I am talking about general productivity programs such as Word 2011 and Excel 2011. That is all much faster than my 13" MBP when it had a hard drive as Word 2011 would take approximately 15 seconds before it would open. Further more, I have a dozen macros that I run in MATLAB. Each macro is connected to the other so that I start one macro and it will reference 11 others as it goes through a process. One macro imports ~150 Excel spreadsheets (each representing a 75X42 matrix of data), another imports a blank, a simple 2X75 Excel spreadsheet, manipulates each one, asks for some input data, and then spits out a series of corrected graphs and matrices in MATLAB.

That would easily take 1 full minute to execute on my 13" MBP when it had a hard drive. Now the whole process is done in 17 seconds on my MBA (it took the same amount of time on my MBP after installing an SSD). So no, I guess HDDs are the exact same as SSDs.

And? That happens on a daily basis including when an OS is running. Even office productivity programs are constantly loading some type of data. I also don't really see what the CPU/GPU comment means as processors have been able to handle data at rates faster than what HDDs can deliver for a while now. That is clearly evident by the amount of performance increases observed ACROSS THE BOARD when systems have SSDs in them. You can't tell me that cold booting into an OS in 14 seconds vs 45-60 seconds isn't a performance increase. If it isn't, that defies the laws of physics and you need to come up with a PhD thesis defending that.

Either way, your ideology has been shutdown and I really don't understand where it is coming from. You can keep trying to argue your invalid point if you want, it won't make any difference as outside readers visiting this thread would be smart enough to know otherwise.

 

Your "explanation" however, is not factual.

As I've said, there ARE uses for which it could make a big difference-I imagine if you work with large image files and whatnot that it would. Typical office use is not one of those cases you'd see a big difference.

Actually the second gen version has 8, but you're probably not aware of how it works. Even the 4 is EXTREMELY effective as a cache, to the point where boot times are cut by 1/2 or 2/3, and are much closer to a good SSD than to a regular drive.

Obviously I completely disagree with you about optical drives being "dead". I use one every day...

Are you talking about the Core 2 version? If you MUST buy an Air, please get the current revision. The clocks are higher, and the CPU is probably 20% or thereabouts faster at the same clocks, and it can overclock itself making it even faster. Not sure about OS X tools to actually find out how fast it is, and the small chassis probably limits how much it overclocks, but at any rate the difference between the current and last gen versions are pretty substantial.

Yes. That was my point

And those types of programs are NOT much faster post boot on Windows 7 for me from a mechanical drive to an XT to an SSD. The larger jump came for me from the regular drive to the XT, but that type of stuff gets cached even when you're running a mechanical drive, and even if it didn't, would still be in RAM for me all day regardless (or indefinitely if I used sleep more).

So you've (apparently) got a situation where it matters (although too I'd point out there's a GIGANTIC difference between a 5400RPM drive and a 7200RPM drive, and again to the XT). I've never said there can't be. That program however is not a typical one most people are running.

I run all sorts of things that are probably fairly similar in like SPSS and the like, and the hard drive in that case isn't a bottleneck at all-it's the CPU 100%. Ditto for some other programs I run. None of that stuff is normal usage for most people either.

Yes. And that's irrelevant. That "background noise" of the OS hitting the storage system is well below the threshold of what a 7200RPM, and presumably 5400RPM drive can handle. As I was writing in this thread yesterday, I was monitoring my disk and CPU and GPU usage. My CPU pegged out repeatedly at various points. My GPU uses over half it's power at various points. My disk is also being constantly accessed...but well below the point that it's relevant what type it is.

I (and you) can see this for yourself, and it verifies exactly what it "feels" like, that the biggest benefit in normal office use is from boot time. Frankly I loved when I first got my XT, as boot times went from long enough that I didn't want to stand there and wait, to short enough that I couldn't walk away before it was ready. That's really cool, but even THAT isn't "necessary" for most anyone. When I went to my SSD, the difference was far more subtle.

That statement depends ENTIRELY on what you're doing, and is no more or less true today than it was in 1982. There are all sorts of situations where the CPU and/or GPU are the bottleneck, and not the hard drive. In fact the only real thing I do where the hard drive is the bottleneck is copying shows around from my Tivo (at least copying them on my local system, my network's the bottleneck otherwise).

Actually that reminds me. Not only is a 7200RPM drive easily fast enough to handle the "background noise" you get doing normal desktop stuff, it's easily fast enough to do so WHILE ALSO PLAYING BACK A 1080 MPEG2 VIDEO. I know from experience, and was reminded when I was playing last week's episode of Nova while I still had my monitoring software going yesterday.

I don't know why you think mechanical drives are so slow, but they can EASILY handle that "background noise". Heck, there's virtually no difference even when I'm saving out a typical sized Open Document file.

Yikes. I seriously don't get this thread.... This is the second time IN THIS POST where you've claimed I've said something that's actually exactly the opposite of what I've said.

I've been saying it's a huge benefit FROM THE BEGINNING. I'll also note however that there's a much bigger jump from a 7200RPM drive to an XT than from an XT to a quality SSD for that, though there is still one. On both the XT and my SSD, I sometimes actually have my two startup programs already loaded before the desktop even has time to fade in, while the mechanical drive I feel could be 30-60 seconds before it was REALLY ready even after booting.

My "ideology"? Dude...look at your monitoring software. You can easily verify this for yourself. Doesn't mean there aren't cases where an SSD (or an XT) will help more, and I never claimed otherwise, but typical desktop usage aren't those cases.

I sure hope they're smart enough to actually verify for themselves, look at how OSes actually work, etc.

 

I share precisely the same hope.

 

You can take your own advice you know. You don't need "academic papers" or whatever to run a monitoring program.

 

Indeed, I have. I appreciate the thoughtful tip, nevertheless. The fun thing about monitoring software is that it shows you what your computer is using, in terms of resources of your storage drive, memory, and CPU.

Unfortunately, it's not able to express to you WHY any particular usage behavior occurs. Whenever your hard drive spikes and your CPU bottoms out, your CPU could have been doing something else, but it's waiting for your hard drive. This machine is on an SSD. My desktop uses a traditional hard drive. See, your CPU is basically getting everything done immediately. If any operation ever occurs which requires something to be written to the hard drive, or read from the hard drive, before continuing, that's when the delay happens.

On this machine, I use the computer normally, and I can watch the SSD spike for split second whenever reads occur. On my desktop, the reads take dramatically longer. I use normal applications like iTunes, Xcode, firefox on this machine. It has a core 2 and an SSD.

My desktop has a much faster clocked quad core and a regular hard drive. I use similar types of applications on windows 7. The difference is obvious. The desktop is faster for things like encoding video and video games, where I have no choice but to accept the loading time. This laptop is faster for all general usage. It's night and day.

 

Amazing how a simple question can turn into this kind of discussion. I'm sure the OPs question has been thoroughly answered.

And yes, an SSDs is a great upgrade to a systems. Makes the system run faster overall. I have an SSD in all 5 of my notebooks. After I received my first SSD I was blown away by the difference that I went out and bought 4 more for the other notebooks.