MacBook Air with pci-e storage

[KaareKanin]

http://anandtech.com/show/7058/2013-macbook-air-pcie-ssd-and-haswell-ult-inside

So apple didn't say this during that show, but it seems the MacBook Air got more upgrades than just the CPU.

The transfer speeds are far higher than any single sata 3.0 disk, and averages 790/740 r/w speeds. The flip side is however seems to be that this is a proprietary solution, so disk swaps might be a thing of the past for the Air. We'll see what the ifixit guys finds...

[Lyons]

They've always used PCI-E storage (except for the original MBA which used a PATA drive). The Retina MBP's also use it.  :)

[Mac]

I think they did? The at least mentioned it was faster even if they didn't mention it was PCI-e.

 

I know the mentioned the Mac Pro did.

 

Anyway, they are incredible speeds, much faster than the 2012 model.

[91Chris]

Definitely mentioned it fella.

Watched it live on my rents Apple TV

[TheSLSAMG]

I believe the MBA doesn't use PCI-E, it uses an Apple proprietary connector.

[KaareKanin]

Well, they said it was faster storage, but the push to pci-e is pretty big, and they didn't mention that

They've always used PCI-E storage (except for the original MBA which used a PATA drive). The Retina MBP's also use it. :)

[Lyons]

Well, they said it was faster storage, but the push to pci-e is pretty big, and they didn't mention that

 

Ah huh, I confused m-SATA with PCI-e  :P I don't know why other manufacturers don't use PCI-e instead of dual m-SATA RAID0 configurations.

[KaareKanin]

Ah huh, I confused m-SATA with PCI-e  :P I don't know why other manufacturers don't use PCI-e instead of dual m-SATA RAID0 configurations.

 

Honest mistake!

 

I don't know why, but I'm guessing is a mix of cost and the difficulty of changing standards around. 

[GoodBytes]

PCI-E is great... but the problem is that it can only go as fast as the memory chips and controller allows.

Also, you guys have to stop looking at sequential speed. Because 99% to 100% of file you interact with every day (unless you are doing movie production, and moving large files all the time), you never reach such speed, as small file speed is much slower. Right now, small file speed don't even come remotely close to SATA-2 speed. SSD manufacture really need to work on that, and they are.

[Nicktrance]

PCI-E is great... but the problem is that it can only go as fast as the memory chips and controller allows.

Also, you guys have to stop looking at sequential speed. Because 99% to 100% of file you interact with every day (unless you are doing movie production, and moving large files all the time), you never reach such speed, as small file speed is much slower. Right now, small file speed don't even come remotely close to SATA-2 speed. SSD manufacture really need to work on that, and they are.

True, random access is still very similar whether on SATA 3 or PCIe, bandwidth isn't really the problem there.

[KaareKanin]

PCI-E is great... but the problem is that it can only go as fast as the memory chips and controller allows.

Also, you guys have to stop looking at sequential speed. Because 99% to 100% of file you interact with every day (unless you are doing movie production, and moving large files all the time), you never reach such speed, as small file speed is much slower. Right now, small file speed don't even come remotely close to SATA-2 speed. SSD manufacture really need to work on that, and they are.

Most of the OS interaction at least. I have never compared SSDs myself, but things that I would say takes the most time on a day to day level is opening heavier prorgrams and accessing libraries. is this too mainly small size interactions?

[GoodBytes]

Most of the OS interaction at least. I have never compared SSDs myself, but things that I would say takes the most time on a day to day level is opening heavier prorgrams and accessing libraries. is this too mainly small size interactions?

These are all small file access, maybe the exe is big.. or maybe 1 dll file.. but if you try and duplicate it... and see how long it takes (that is the file going to memory for duplication, and write back to the SSD, so I guess you can device by 2, if we ignore difference between read and write to simplify things) you can see what the effect is. It's still pretty fast for <50Mb file.. at least on my side. Unless the exe is 100MB or something big like that, then yes, you are correct, but this is rare for a program.

[Lukiose]

These are all small file access, maybe the exe is big.. or maybe 1 dll file.. but if you try and duplicate it... and see how long it takes (that is the file going to memory for duplication, and write back to the SSD, so I guess you can device by 2, if we ignore difference between read and write to simplify things) you can see what the effect is. It's still pretty fast for <50Mb file.. at least on my side. Unless the exe is 100MB or something big like that, then yes, you are correct, but this is rare for a program.

So in actual fact, we should be going for SSDs with higher read/write speeds for the small files, right?

How does read/write affect boot time though? Please enlighten, i'm interested :3

[Keystone Nyan Cat]

I really hope its not propreitary and we can use our own stuff there, otherwise Apple will be charging us 100$ for a 16GB solution there :( 

[GoodBytes]

So in actual fact, we should be going for SSDs with higher read/write speeds for the small files, right?

How does read/write affect boot time though? Please enlighten, i'm interested :3

For many of us, yes.

Here is an old screen shot that I have, back of WIn7 days, of my SATA-3 SSD (OCZ Vertex 4) on SATA-2.

Notice how 4K is not not coming close to the max. 512K is near that, possibly writes speed is affected by it...

But 4K, not even close.. 128K while not measured, will obviously be in between 512K and 4K.

And if you look at any benchmark score, they'll show this.

Write doesn't really effect Window startup. While it does write stuff during the process, it's mostly little things. Now I don't know exactly what it is, I am not a Microsoft employee working with the team responsible for this to know. But, beside some registry values, pending updates, I just don't see what it will need to write.

Read yes. All Windows system files are visible, it's all under Windows folder in your C:\ drive... and as you can see, most of them are under 1MB.

Now, usually, a higher max sequential speed means that small file speed will also increase, hence why you see a visual difference between a SATA-1 and SATA-2 SSD, not so much SATA-3 thought (at least on my side, but benchmarks does show a few points faster (not to mention that SATA controller itself gets better and faster), but, higher max speed does not necessarily mean faster performance. My Corsair Force GT, for example, despite peeking the SATA-3 read and write, it's slower than my SATA-3 OCZ Vertex 4. Windows takes more time to boot on my Force GT than my Vertex 4.

Basically, while i expect an increase performance of small files with Mac Pro PCI-E SATA, I don't expect it to be that much faster. Now, what we don't know, and that could make me wrong, is that on the SSD itself, Apple does a RAID0 to gain more performance out of everything. But I personally doubt it.