Storage Effect

SSD is kinda cool in MacBook Air, but not worth today’s price

Ars Technica’s review of the MacBook Air provides a thorough user-level evaluation of the value of SSD in a notebook. 

The conclusion:

The $1,300 question is whether the SSD is worth the extra cash. The answer seems to be no. I experienced only moderate gains in battery life and not very noticeable speed differences. The one major benefit of the SSD model is that it doesn’t cause the same types of slowdowns as the HDD model during times of high disk activity, and that’s certainly a huge plus. Speedy read times are great, too, but they are balanced out by pokey write times.

Still, even if it’s more usable, it’s hard to justify the huge price difference for the SSD model. If you’ve got an extra $1,300 to blow and, for some reason, haven’t just bought a second computer with it, perhaps the SSD model is for you. For anyone else looking to buy an Air, the HDD model appears to provide the most bang for the buck.

You get what you pay for.  For SSDs, the ‘gets’ aren’t worth $1300 bucks.  The big surprise to me was that in some ways the SSD notebook was actually worse than the disk drive version. 

Don’t worry, the premium will drop and SSD’s will improve.  But it’s going to be years, not months, before most of us choose SSD.