MacBook SSD may actually be one of the fastest MacBooks

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]