Where It's At

Got a new Mac Air yesterday with the SSD drive. I also have a MBC, 2.4 with a 160 gig drive. Let me tell ya, the Air is so fast at loading programs, that it makes the MBC look positively SLOW. I know the SSD is a very expensive option but this is the way of the future; a slower processor and yet at least 1.5-2 times the speed

Hate to burst your bubble but your speed has nothing to do with your SSD. That was a decent waste of money that doesn't increase HD speed and only allows for a tiny increase in battery life.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/06/macbook-air-with-ssd-tested-performance-boost-nowhere-to-be-fou/

theonegod said:

Hate to burst your bubble but your speed has nothing to do with your SSD. That was a decent waste of money that doesn't increase HD speed and only allows for a tiny increase in battery life.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/06/macbook-air-with-ssd-tested-performance-boost-nowhere-to-be-fou/

Click to expand...

I read all the articles too; this a test by a user that uses both, an HDD and the SSD, and feel the pin prick, there is a HUGE difference in speed. the processor is 1.8 vs 2.4 in the MBP.
You can't live and die by what reporters say, (look at Geo Bush and the WMD's) try it yourself in real world conditions

I dont doubt you are seeing programs open quicker. But you wont find file copy to be faster, or any form of sustained disk use.

Quickly opening a program is the kind of thing that may seem nifty and a good test of speed when you first get a new computer but later you find that in actual read/write access overtime there is no benefit.

Plus there's the placebo effect. You subconsciously think of the SSD as being faster, and thus it "feels" faster than a normal drive.

In all actuality, solid state drives are quite a bit faster than platter spinning ones, a little while back Maximum PC (yeah I know) did a head to head to head, compared a notebook SSD to the fastest Serial ATA platter spinner, a Western Digital Raptor, the little mTron SSD quite simply BLEW the Raptor away in almost all aspects from seek times to sustained data rates...., for the full story, just google Maximum PC mTron Review.....I have the print version. It's always been said lately that the biggest bottleneck in computer performance, regardless if it's Mac or a nasty Wintel machine, it is the hard drive.....getting data to and from the memory and processor from the platters....SSDs are quickly showing that the bottleneck is decreasing significantly