Monday, May 5, 2014

New MacBook Air have much slower SSD drives


The new MacBook Air line is cheaper and comes with the latest Intel CPUs, which is a great thing. However, there seems to be a slight - or not so slight - snag when it comes to SSD performance, with the new MacBooks performing a lot worse than previous year's models.


While it is expected for the 128 and 256GB SSD versions to have different performance (bigger drives allow for enhanced performance by performing read/write accesses in parallel), there's nothing that can explain why, for similarly sized drives, the new models to be up to three times slower.

For a simple unzipping test, the new MacBook Air took over 86s for something the previous model could do in roughly 43s (for the 256GB version); and over 127s for something previously done in 46.6s (in the 128GB model).

Until things get sorted out: to see if there's some firmware/driver glitch; or if there are different batches with different SSD suppliers than can explain such a big performance differente; it's probably best for you to delay your new MacBook Air acquisition. If this comes to be the norm, then you might be better off finding a used 2013 model as, for most common types of usage, it's better to have a slightly slower CPU but a faster SSD than the opposite.

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