“Adding iOS UI elements of OS X means lots more small I/Os, the kind that disks do poorly and SSDs do well,” Robin Harris writes for ZDNet. “Don’t buy a new Mac without an SSD or you’ll regret it!”
“All iOS devices run on solid state storage. Mac OS is including many iOS features – such as remembering all open windows and documents – that require many small I/Os for both data and metadata,” Harris writes. “Finally, Lion performance – boot up, file access times, page swapping, context switching – all suck using a 7200 RPM drive. And if you’re running FCP X, forget it: booting up on a disk takes minutes from what I’ve seen on an 8-core Mac Pro.”
Harris writes, “How much suckage? Let’s just say that my 1.86GHz Core Duo 2, 4GB MacBook Air with a 128GB SSD outperforms my 3.4GHz quad-core i7, 16GB iMac on ≈90% of the work I do. And it is more stable… Once MacBooks go all SSD, the performance difference between them and most Wintel ‘books will be obvious. Expect more envy from cheap Wintel notebook users.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: On the rare occasion that we use a non-SSD Mac, the experience is jarring, as we’ve become used to the speed of the SSDs in our MacBook Airs and iMacs. It’s a huge difference. Once you go SSD, you won’t go back.
