New MacBook Air 2014 SSD slower than 2013?

The new MacBook Air 2014 has a faster processor than last year, but appears to be significantly slower in the important management of access to the hard disk. To prove there are some tests performed by a U.S. site.

The new MacBook Air 2014 sprouting an advantage over those of last year thanks to the new-generation Haswell processor, but are slower, mysteriously, in the management of the important access to the hard disk. This seems to show that the tests carried out by MacWord that has tested the machines launched at the beginning of this week.

According to benchmarks, copy 6 GB of data on a MacBook Air 11-inch 2014 editions take almost twice as long compared to what is required on a MacBook Air last year. Even if the comparison is made of two disks of different capacities, with the MacBook Air last year that has 256 GB and 128 GB that this year, the difference is hard to justify with the decrease in performance that usually have the disks SSD smaller than the larger ones. MacWorld found inferior performance of the MacBook Air 13-inch edition in 2014 compared to the MacBook Air 11-inch last year, both with 256 GB disk.

The new MacBook Air are just being slow, ” says MacWorld, when it comes to unzip a folder 6GB (intensive operation on the disc), a task for which it takes three times as long. The step has been considerably reduced when those who have done the benchmarks tried to reduce the number of files (keeping their weight), but the MacBook Air 2014 edition is still shown the slowest of the sample taken into consideration, for the precision is was 35% slower than the MacBook Air in 2013 copies and 53% slower in decompression of files. The compression rate was instead of doing the same: only 3% slower on the new than the old.

The difference in performance is demonstrated by Disk Speed ​​Test, a suite of benchmarks specializing in hard drives. The record of the mid-2013 MacBook with 128GB disk clocked a speed of 445 Mbps and 725 Mbps in writing in reading.

The disk of the MacBook Air in 2014 came to only 306 Mbps write and 620 MBps read; the 2013 edition 11-inch model with 256 GB hard disk has reached 687 MBps write and 725 Mbps read; the new MacBook Air 2014 always with 256GB disk had an average of 520 Mbps write and 676 MBps read.

A partial explanation may be the different producer of the disc, since the three discs come with three different manufacturers: the new MacBook Air 11-inch edition in 2014 had a Toshiba drive, one of the new model 13 was manufactured by SanDisk, while the two records of last year were produced by Samsung.

Recall that in 2011 there had been differences in performance of SSD drives in the MacBook Air. Then were the same machines to have a step in performance, determined by different manufacturer: models with slower Toshiba drive, faster than with Samsung drives.

Then it was said that the difference in performance would not have been immediately obvious common user, but the difference measured by MacWorld could begin to be visible to the naked eye even from someone who does not engage in tasks that do not put the whip to the hard disk.