NEED FOR SPEED
Here's a timely review by Ars Technica doing some performance testing on the MacBook Air with a regular 80 GB hard drive, and one with a solid state drive (aka SSD) 64 GB drive:
" The MacBook Air is nice, but as we discovered in our in-depth review, not everything is sunshine and roses—at least with the hard drive model. But there's a higher-end Air as well—1.8GHz with a 64 GB solid-state flash drive instead of your traditional ATA hard drive. We picked up an SSD Air so that we could try it out, run some benchmarks, and report back to you on how much (or little) of a difference that extra $1,300 makes."
Solid state drives over time promise faster performance times vs. mechanical drives with greater reliability, and lower power consumption (i.e., better battery life).
But we're in the early stages of these technologies and the performance benefits in the current crop are not as dramatic as one might expect. Here's the punchline on how Ars Technica comes down on the two drives in a MacBook Air:
"The $1,300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash. The answer seems to be no. I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences. The one major benefit of the SSD model is that it doesn't cause the same types of slowdowns as the HDD model during times of high disk activity, and that's certainly a huge plus."
In particular, the tests showed much better performance in active browsing using Firefox with multiple tabs and sessions running. But the other speed and power benefits were on the meager side.
This bears out my experience with the first generation of SSD , both in my 32 GB Sony TZ ultra-laptop and the new MacBook Air I've been using for the last couple of days.
As the software and hardware used in these drives are further optimized, we will likely see much better relative performance. And the good news will be that prices are likely to be far lower as well over time.
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