How does the performance and battery life of the MacBook Air with a hard drive compare to the SSD version? Is SSD worth the extra cost?

For those unfamiliar with the term "SSD" -- this means "solid state drive", and in basic terms, consists of flash memory with no moving parts (just like the flash-based iPod models).

As noted by Intel in a short article about the advantages of SSD, the technology theoretically offers better reliability and lower power usage (due to the lack of moving parts), as well as speed and size improvements. For small quantities of flash memory, Intel notes that it can be cheaper than a small hard drive, but for larger quantities, the substantial disadvantage of an SSD compared to a hard drive is greatly increased cost.

When introduced, upgrading from the stock MacBook Air with an 80 GB hard drive to one configured with a 64 GB SSD was a massive US$999, or upgrading from the stock configuration with a 1.6 GHz processor to one with a 1.8 GHz processor and the SSD was US$1399. On July 8, 2008, Apple dropped the price of these upgrades to US$599 and US$799, respectively.

So, the question is whether the advantages of the SSD are worth the substantial cost? Does the SSD provide such a boost in performance and battery life to justify the cost?

In a great follow-up to an already in-depth review, MacWorld reported that:

In terms of Speedmark, our battery of general-use tests, the base MacBook Air model scored a 124. The Macbook Air with the same hard drive but a 1.8 GHz processor improved to a score of 130. The model with both the 1.8 GHz processor and the SSD earned a score of 140. To put that in percentage terms, the [US]$299 processor upgrade improved the overall speed of the system by 4.8 percent, while the [US]$999 drive upgrade improved the speed by 7.7 percent. . .

[In terms of its battery], The MacBook Air with SSD showed a bit more life than the models with standard hard drives, though we didn't run our tests enough times to make a definitive statement about how much power savings, if any, might be attributable to the solid-state drive.

The always excellent ArsTechnica likewise published a follow-up comparing the SSD version to the HDD version, and regarding its performance and battery life found:

The SSD does worse in sequential disk tests and writing in general, but spanks the HDD in random disk tests and reading from the disk. . . However, one major difference I saw while using the SSD model is that it didn't suffer entire machine slowdowns when there was a lot of disk activity -- or at least less so than the HDD model. . .

When using the SSD Air in exactly the same manner as the HDD Air and running it down twice, I got an average of 2 hours and 31 minutes of battery life. That's... pretty bad, and two minutes lower than the HDD model. But this number is low because of the two extremes I got when running these tests. My first number was 2 hours and 52 minutes, and the second was 2 hours and 10 minutes. Incidentally, I did less during the second rundown than the first, since my cable service was down and I couldn't do anything on the Internet. I wrote a few paragraphs of this review and watched some TV shows stored on my drive.

If I optimistically decide to run with the first number -- 2 hours and 52 minutes -- that's a 29 minute (average) gain over the HDD's battery life. That's still not the massive gain that I had hoped for. [In the interest of full disclosure, Ars notes that some users have reported higher battery life numbers, and the site is looking into the matter.]

Both reviews should be read in their entirety for the full perspective provided by the authors, but each was unanimous in his or her assessment -- the SSD version offers an improvement in speed, but it's not worth a grand.

Ultimately, the SSD version of the MacBook Air does provide better performance and perhaps better battery life, as well as greater durability and less noise, but particularly given the drop in capacity, the money would be better spent elsewhere for the vast majority of users.

Also see:

• What is the battery life of the MacBook Air in real-world usage tests?
• How fast is the MacBook Air compared to the MacBook and MacBook Pro?

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