Stake Ventures

Yes it expensive, but the first early benchmarks and user reports are trickling in now and it looks very impressive indeed. This adds even more fuel into the internal MacBook controversy I’m facing.

MacRumors user bjdraw posted XBench marks for the MacBook Air 1.8GHz SSD

Was just at the Apple store playing with the 1.8 SSD. I downloaded xBench and ran the test. The overall disk score was 48, which is faster than any Apple laptop benched recently by Engadget .

Salty Pirate also tried it out:

The SSD is wicked fast. Programs load almost instantly. Faster than on my MBP 2.4 with a 200GB 7200 disk. I have changed my mind and I am gonna get the SSD link

Viper says:

I think you would notice a performance difference….what i have read is that opening itunes with the SSD takes <1 bounce of the dock icon, while with the 1.6/80 it takes 2-3 bounces....since this action is mostly reading from the HDD and not processor intense, you can infer that the SSD is much faster. link

Suitability for development

Assuming that you can weed your stuff down to fit on the 64GB model, what about development speed.

SSD drives are fast at anything except random access writes, which I think is what goes on when you compile code and run lots of inserts and updates in a database. Can anyone provide an opinion on this? It’s not that I’m going to be hosting on it, but it would be nice if autotest speeds aren’t adversely affected by it as I talked about in my previous MacBook Air Post.

For easy reading here are the XBench Bench marks:

Results    59.23    
    System Info        
        Xbench Version        1.3
        System Version        10.5.1 (9B2324)
        Physical RAM        2048 MB
        Model        MacBookAir1,1
        Drive Type        MCCOE64GEMPP MCCOE64GEMPP
    CPU Test    99.61    
        GCD Loop    198.48    10.46 Mops/sec
        Floating Point Basic    91.95    2.18 Gflop/sec
        vecLib FFT    82.14    2.71 Gflop/sec
        Floating Point Library    82.87    14.43 Mops/sec
    Thread Test    134.99    
        Computation    132.25    2.68 Mops/sec, 4 threads
        Lock Contention    137.85    5.93 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
    Memory Test    148.00    
        System    147.16    
            Allocate    196.92    723.16 Kalloc/sec
            Fill    121.83    5923.81 MB/sec
            Copy    140.85    2909.18 MB/sec
        Stream    148.84    
            Copy    139.04    2871.77 MB/sec
            Scale    138.74    2866.37 MB/sec
            Add    160.25    3413.70 MB/sec
            Triad    160.42    3431.74 MB/sec
    Quartz Graphics Test    107.74    
        Line    111.96    7.45 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
        Rectangle    120.42    35.95 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
        Circle    97.44    7.94 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
        Bezier    109.91    2.77 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
        Text    101.95    6.38 Kchars/sec
    OpenGL Graphics Test    18.27    
        Spinning Squares    18.27    23.18 frames/sec
    User Interface Test    113.53    
        Elements    113.53    521.06 refresh/sec
    Disk Test    47.26    
        Sequential    40.82    
            Uncached Write    33.92    20.83 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    46.51    26.32 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    27.24    7.97 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    97.00    48.75 MB/sec [256K blocks]
        Random    56.13    
            Uncached Write    21.06    2.23 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Write    52.85    16.92 MB/sec [256K blocks]
            Uncached Read    990.68    7.02 MB/sec [4K blocks]
            Uncached Read    259.96    48.24 MB/sec [256K blocks]

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