The successor to the Samsung-branded SSD inside your 2011 MacBook Air has just been announced. The Samsung PM830 supports the SATA revision 3.0 interface and is capable of transmissions of up to 6 Gbps. Not to mention these drives deliver double the performance of company’s current SATA 3 Gbps drives, recording sequential read speeds of 500 MB/s and writes speeds of 350 MB/s. How do you like them apples?
Tagged ‘SSD’
The first wave of Intel Ultrabooks are coming. A leaked photo of the Acer Aspire 3951 Ultrabook has the ultraportable market buzzing this morning. As the first legitimate 2011 MacBook Air alternative for Windows users, the Aspire 3951 will be an eminent threat when it launches this October. Not only will it nearly match the MacBook Air in size and dimensions, the Ultrabook will be priced less than £849.
TDK Corporation has unloaded a new line of solid state drives (SSDs). THE SDG3B series is built off the SATAII interface and ranges in size from 16GB to 128GB. Using MLC NAND flash memory and the TDK GBDriver RS3 controller, the budget-friendly drives achieve maximum read speeds of 160 MB/s and write speeds of 25 MB/s.
Speed tests on the new MacBook Air refresh have revealed an interesting discrepancy. TLD Today benchmarked the 128GB SSDs shipping in the 11in MacBook Air and 13in MacBook Air models and found the smaller model is packing a drive that achieves much faster read/write speeds. The 128GB Samsung SM128C SSD in the 11in MacBook Air delivered 246 MB/s writing and 264 MB/s reading data while the 128GB Toshiba TS128C SSD in the 13in model gave speeds of 156 MB/s and 208 MB/s.
Engadget followed up the discovery with its own tests and verified the difference. It found that 256GB Samsung drive in its older MacBook Air delivered similar speeds to the new 11in MacBook Air but that the 13in MacBook Air was substantially slower. In day-to-day usage, the drop in speed is likely to be unnoticeable but it’s still interesting to discover the difference between models. You can see TLD Today’s demonstration of how some MacBook Air SSDs are speedier than others by clicking through…
For better or worse, the MacBook Air re-invented the so-called netbook segment of modern computing. Fitted in a razor thin aluminum casing with a brilliant display, low power processor, best-in-class trackpad and a full-sized keyboard, how could you improve such a wonderful gadget? Simply head on over to OWC for a ride on the wild side with a mammoth-sized 480GB SSD upgrade — if you can stomach the price tag.
If you bought a new MacBook Air recently you might have benefited from a subtle speed boost. Apple has switched the SSD lurking inside the new MacBook Air from the Toshiba Blade X-gale SSD to a blade SSD from Samsung. Apple doesn’t normally up a product’s performance without kicking out a refresh but in this case that seems like exactly what’s happened…
With the exception of the new 3TB Constellation ES.2 hard drive, all of Seagate’s 2011 product announcements this afternoon consisted of 2.5-inch for factor drives. Cache has been boosted across the board from 16MB to 64MB and all of the new drives come with a self-encryption option. Bottom line, expect performance and capacity improvements between 50 and 100 percent.
