I am thinking about getting the 128GB air (11 or 13) and was wondering after monolingual and other tweaks (I don't know any others) what is the default capacity. Is the 128 truly 128 or is 120gb or somthing than minus 10GB for the OS instal? The reason why I ask is because My itunes folder is 92gb and I expect to expand it another 10GB in the next 3 months. I know I want at least 12gb for apps and downloads so this is cutting it really close. I don't want to use an external drive or go for the 256GB one because I feel that is too much $$$ and/or trouble (always having to have an external drive plugged in for music, which this laptop would be used for 99% of the time). Also was thinking about getting the OWC 180gb, but how difficult and how much $ would I get for selling the 128GB parts on eBay?
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It's 128GB, minus 15GB-20GB for OS X. You need the 256GB model for sure. Once SSD's fill up they slow down.
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I agree with Mr.Mischief, the 128GB models isn't going to be enough for you if you must have all your iTunes on it.
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Yes, get the 256gb, considering how it's recommended that you leave at least 10%ish of the SSD empty for maximum performance.
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It is actually 120 (little bit above but not 121 gb). I would advice a new install if you are coming from a 500 gb model like I did with my time machine backup. I had to get my SSD replaced and haven't had the core audio problem since, but OS itsef is like 10-20 gb'ish.
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masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
There's a difference between the way manufacturers count storage and computers traditionally count storage.
128 GB - GB vs bytes - Google Search
There are no tweaks or adjustments. Your 128GB hard drive will have a capacity greater than or equal to the above figure. Mac OS X also has adopted the manufacturer counting method in the OS for consistency. Each file will end up taking slightly more reported space than it would on another operating system. There's no functional difference in the end, but it should alleviate your concern over consistency. That means your 92 GB folder would be reported as about 99 GB in OS X.
I don't think the macbook air 180 GB with the intent of selling of the 128 GB is a good idea. I think you should just get the 256 GB model. Buy a used model on eBay with an extended warranty if you need to save money.
You could also look into iTunes Match assuming you'll have a network connection most of the time, and don't have more than 25,000 songs. -
kornchild2002 Notebook Deity
I also don't think buying the 180GB SSD, installing it, and selling hte 128GB SSD is a good idea especially since 110GB (current 99GB+10GB) is going to be dedicated to an iTunes library (and who knows how much more that will expand over another year or two). In the end, 180GB won't take you that much further than the 128GB SSD already in the MBA by the time you add in the OS and 12GB for programs. That right there puts everything at around 142GB. Leave another 5GB for free space and the 180GB drive doesn't have much to spare.
Besides, that 180GB drive is $265. Combine that with the purchase of a mid-2011 13" 128GB MBA ($1250 at Best Buy) and you are only $50 shy of the cost of the 256GB 13" mid-2011 MBA. I just don't see the economics in doing something like that. -
masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
well, he wants to recoup the costs by selling the old one.
I think you would be lucky to get $100 from the original drive. Most likely less. That puts you at ~$175+ on top of a 128GB MBA. As korn said, 180GB most likely wouldn't be sufficient for you in after a while if you have a 110GB iTunes library to manage.
I would give iTunes match a second look. Or maybe google music if you don't have an iDevice and don't mind using a web browser to interact with your music. -
Buy 13" 128GB SSD MBA, then pick up an Intel SSD, throw that in and sell the 128GB SSD. The ones in MBAs i was told are toshibas and are slow compared to even an Intel 320 series.
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Apple uses proprietary SSDs, so you can't just replace it with an Intel.
Also, there are 2 types of SSDs in the Air, the Toshiba and the Samsung. Samsungs are noticeably faster. -
masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
1. it should be faster than the low end intel drive
2. the OP can't use the aforementioned intel drive -
kornchild2002 Notebook Deity
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hey guys just checked in windows (NTFS) and my music is actually 75gb, I can do with out the podcasts, (which where taking up 20GB) so lets see:
120GB
-75GB
_____________
45GB
so minus 15GB FOR OS/Apps
30 GB
10GB FREE for best perfomance
10gb for downloads
leaves me with 10 GB to expand my iTunes collection, thats probaly more than engough for the amount of time Im going to keep it/ssd upgrade prices will get much lower in a year or so i think.
the 11" 128 air is 1150 on amazon
the 13" C2D old model w/256gb SSD is $1200
I want thunderbolt for external graphics coming in the future, the backlit keyboard is a big "meh" and I don't ever max out CPU maybe once a month. but its nice to have the xtra power. reason why i need itunes on the machine itself is many fold, but right now mainly because I need it backed up twice, and with current external hard drive prices Im not buying another one.
still deciding. the screen size is not really a factor in my decision. I also have the option of buying an old uni body white macbook off ebay and just waiting till summer...I am also worried that a major overall of the air's will destroy the resale vaule of the current gen. -
masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
thunderbolt external graphics is not something I would put much stock into. upgrading the SSD later is also not going to be cost effective.
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Sent you a PM you might be interested in.
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kornchild2002 Notebook Deity
Best Buy is selling the 13" 128GB MBA for $1250 new (Amazon has it for $1235). You might as well spend the extra $100 (or $85 if you buy from Amazon) and get something with a much larger display that has a higher resolution. In my experience, people who buy the 11" MBA often end up regretting it due to the small display. It is still a powerful, portable machine but 11.6" really isn't a whole lot. 13.3" is much, much more manageable and comfortable enough to use all day.
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Looks like I am going for that 256GB old version from amazon, hope that extra year sitting on a shelf is not too bad for it. -
masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
You will almost certainly need an external monitor.
The reason you shouldn't hold out for the MSI external graphics adapter is that it hasn't been priced yet. It could easily end up being $250+ (that's without a graphics card or monitor) - and then it would enable you to run games at your desk, but you would still be limited to a dual core processor and however much memory you start out with. It would cost about $400 with the graphics card if it's priced at 250, and it could be priced even higher. You'd still need a monitor ($150+ for something decent)
Meanwhile, you could just get an entire small form factor desktop for about the same price, which would offer better performance, storage space, and the ability to upgrade components easily in the future.
Depends on the price, but these types of things are niche enough that they tend to be prohibitively expensive. That's why you shouldn't buy now expecting to rely on that in the future.
It most likely will take a 6770 max, which is better than what is in the macbook air, but isn't worth $400 to get running. -
kornchild2002 Notebook Deity
Why the 2010 model? You are willing to take that much of a hit in CPU performance simply for the storage capacity? What about Thunderbolt? You won't get that in the 2010 model. The 2011 MBA is above and beyond the 2010 model in almost every way, shape, and form. The external might be different but the Sandy Bridge setup really does add a lot more making the 2011 MBA perform more like a fully fledged notebook (and not just a notebook with a Core i3 processor) whereas the 2010 model relied on technology that was 4 years old and took a hit in performance.
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Just get a 13" Macbook Pro. Cheaper, user replaceable drives, DVD, and more powerful. That's what I should have done *sigh*
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kornchild2002 Notebook Deity
Actually, the entry level MBP is on par with the 13" MBA in terms of computing power. Benchmarks put the two neck and neck. The Core i7 13" MBP pulls ahead when turbo boost but it will even pull ahead of the 15" MBP with a higher end quad-core Core i7 for some things. So the whole "one is more powerful" argument really isn't valid here since the mid-2011 MBA (particularly the model with the 1.7GHz Core i5) isn't going to have any noticeable slowdown vs a 13" MBP.
Also, technically speaking, the SSD in the MBA can be replaced by the end user. OWC provides upgrades and their prices aren't all that bad compared to standard 2.5" SSD drives. The lack of an optical drive does not dimish the MBA either if someone hardly ever uses it. I purchased a 13" MBP and used the optical drive about once every 2 months. So losing it wasn't a big deal at all. Others who still rely on optical storage formats would not even be looking at an Air anyway. -
Also, technically speaking, the SSD in the MBA can be replaced by the end user. OWC provides upgrades and their prices aren't all that bad compared to standard 2.5" SSD drives. The lack of an optical drive does not dimish the MBA either if someone hardly ever uses it. I purchased a 13" MBP and used the optical drive about once every 2 months. So losing it wasn't a big deal at all. Others who still rely on optical storage formats would not even be looking at an Air anyway.[/QUOTE] -
kornchild2002 Notebook Deity
How is it less capable if it is "more or less" inline with the MBA? Granted, a 13" MBP with 8GB of RAM and the i7 CPU can outperform a MBA (and even a high end MBP) when the CPU is stressed and there are enough programs open to consume that much RAM. However, is the average user (or even power user) going to do that on a regular basis? Nope.
Also, if you equip an entry level 13" MBP with a 128GB SSD (whether its from Apple or not), the cost is going to be more than the entry level 13" MBA. So, if someone is not going to use the optical drive, there is absolutely nothing holding them to the MBP. You will get the same performance in a smaller package with a higher resolution display. The whole idea that a MBA can perform as well as a MBP and not feel any different is a strong selling point. It shows that an ultra portable can compete with a full fledged notebook and not be stuck somewhere between netbooks and notebooks (much like the 2008 and late 2010 MBAs). -
At BEST if you spend a lot more the Air can match the cheapest Pro. That's not a selling point.
And at any rate, "it's almost as good as the cheapest Macbook Pro if you spend more on it" isn't a good defense for the Air.
IMO this is a VERY bad trade off for the majority of users.
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masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
Since almost everything we use our computers for is limited by hard drive access time, I would have to overall disagree. I would get a macbook air rather than the 13" pro, all things considered.
If you want better computer performance, the best way to do it is make the hard drive faster. Notice that Intel is getting into hard drives. The reason that big tech companies like to keep your focus on processors and graphics cards is that they are making a ton of money doing it, those parts are all cheap to make (or buy). SSDs are really really expensive, and users do not have any interest in dropping storage space. -
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masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
There aren't that many cases where you can avoid using the hard drive, and in essentially all of those cases, improving hard drive performance leads to greater overall performance per dollar cost than improving CPU/GPU/memory performance.
Video games are a common use case where the design of the application often enables one to avoid using the hard drive entirely (except during loading of the content, which can take a very long time). More commonly, operations on data are finished quickly enough that reading from or writing to the hard drive is either a short term inevitability, or you are waiting on the user (in which case none of the computer's components make a difference). -
That's a SUPER fringe case anyway. IF you want exactly 120/128GB, and IF you don't need Ethernet, and IF you need an SSD, and IF you don't watch shows/movies...
THEN it's like $100 cheaper maybe, but still inferior. Mess with those variables a bit and it's inferior, and more expensive.
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masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
I could cite some academic reading material for you if you're interested in learning, but I'm not going to scrape through google for it.
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Presumably you've got systems there with a fast mechanical drive, and an SSD, and can see for yourself. There's a HUGE difference in booting between a 7200RPM drive and Seagate's Momentus XT. Like the time is at least cut in half, maybe a third. No question that's real.
Less of a jump going to an SSD, though there is some.
But past that? Once you're in the OS? Makes no difference for any of my normal programs-they're close to instantaneous on either. Unless the system is RAM starved, it's caching things anyway. SSDs don't magically make things feel faster. If you're waiting on a program to respond or whatever, you're limited by the CPU/GPU as it's pegging out at 100%. -
masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
- begin
- load data (slow)
- operate on data (fast)
- write data (slow)
- end
This turns out to be the use case in more situations than you would expect. Of course, if you're just talking about videogames (or more generally programs which real time and interactive) this may not be the case. You might have:
- begin
- load data (slow)
- operate on data (fast)
- (much later) end
Computer developers generally jump through significant hoops to avoid using the hard drive at all in these types of applications, because it's such a slow device that relying on it in any way would break the interactive nature of the application. This also limits the domain of applicability to systems which are designed to operate for a long time (read: indefinitely) on a small set of data. This could be an acceptable design restraint for games in many cases, but it doesn't make any sense in the general case. (Some applications operate on larger data sets all at once, or more commonly, they may operate on smaller data sets intermittently over a wide potential range, where they may not know in advance which small portions of a large data set are relevant).
Obviously, you're thinking in terms of video games. You're using the CPU and GPU for that, and you're absolutely right.
I'm not talking about it any more. Hopefully this helps get the idea across. -
The weakest link in your PC is your storage drive, end of story. -
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Loading and using Visual Studio 2010 with Windows Server 8 Developer Preview running in the background on VMWare... 15% peak, avg 1%.
I sure hope my MBP isn't substantially worse.
EDIT:
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Windows and OS X report this differently, which is what I'm guessing you're looking at. 20% in Windows on for example a Core 2 x2 would be one core running at around 50%. Far less on a quad, or with hyperthreading.
It just isn't a huge benefit once the OS is going for kind of "day to day" activities like office, Firefox and the like. Though would be if you were working with giant files. (Although if you were you might also want to worry about burning through an SSD.) -
When I'm testing 4-8 virtual machines, then it takes a bit of a hit. The bottleneck when I started doing that? HDD not CPU/RAM. Though I have a 2.2Ghz Core i7 Quad with 16GB RAM. When I went from a 7200RPM 500GB to a 256GB SSD with 128GB mSATA, huge jump in performance.
That is my work laptop - W520.
Similar results on my personal laptop - X220, but 2.7Ghz Dual Core with HT and 8GB memory. (See sig) -
masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
You're actually wrong about libreoffice (and quite possible "the like", but it depends). Libreoffice is actually an OK example. The amount of computer time libreoffice spends waiting for the hard drive is vast compared to the amount of time libreoffice spends waiting on the CPU. Since libreoffice is expected to autosave your work in case of a crash or power failure or what have you, it has to keep writing to the hard drive as you make changes to your document. It can't save every change as you make it, because your hard drive has such a limited capacity for input and output operations that it would end up blocking hard drive access if any other application needed it. Meanwhile, it's taking up very little CPU time and memory, and getting a faster CPU or faster/more memory would give you no benefit.
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SSDs don't help with PERFORMANCE at all. They just load stuff faster. Once it's in RAM, it's irrelevant...which mostly means once the system's finished booting it's irrelevant.
Don't know what you're looking at, but without doing much of anything special here I'm bouncing between 20-95% of one of my cores right now as I opened it to look at it. -
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Each program you run is going to be accessing small amounts of data on the drive. With a HDD, small data reads are the worst due to access times. That is why SSDs offer a huge performance boost, all those small reads and writes are completed with very very small access times now.
Your CPU spends most of its time sleeping.
Again, this is coming from Windows experience. -
kornchild2002 Notebook Deity
So I don't understand how that is a valid argument especially since day-to-day tasks aren't even run like that. -
Also, if you check out the Lenovo forums, the only reason anyone suggests an i5 over an i3 are the features the i5 brings (AES, vPro, etc) and not the processor speed which most say is only noticeable when running benchmarks. Same for i5 to i7 - i7 only brings USB3 in some Lenovo models, otherwise its a waste of money. (These are all based on the 2 core models, not the 4 core)
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You can't talk about the CPU spending lots of time idle, and then claim the hard drive is under this huge load. The entire time I've been writing this, the highest transfer rate my hard drive's used is 100KB/s, while one of my CPUs has nearly maxed out repeatedly.
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Power users would prefer a faster CPU and GPU and more RAM-always, just as they use 7200RPM drives and SSDs in place of 5400RPM drives. I really don't care that some casual, clueless user is happy running their ill configured PC with outdated software on a low end CPU. -
masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
No matter how many posts you dissect and declare wrong, it doesn't change the fact that increasing your hard drive performance will improve system performance dramatically compared to adding CPU power at the same cost.
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Compare an SSD 4k read/write speed:
Micron RealSSD C300 256GB SATA 6Gbps SSD Review - CrystalDiskMark v3.0 - Legit Reviews
To a HDD:
WD Scorpio Black 750GB Notebook Hard Drive Review - CrystalDiskMark v3.0.1 - Legit Reviews
See the difference?
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On the other hand, my entire CPU just shot to 100% while opening this thread in another tab to respond to it.
You can EASILY verify this for yourself.
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masterchef341 The guy from The Notebook
in general, your method of thinking about this problem relies on a design in which it is possible to preload all data into memory and where the operations required on that small data set are very large or infinite, or indefinite.
this design is possible in a relatively small subset of program types. programs in a modern operating system environment are designed to run concurrently with other programs. that means that each program, ideally, loads as little data into memory as is possible, so that other applications with unknown memory requirements can run concurrently without problems. games are a particular counterexample, in that they tend to have large memory requirements and the expectation is that they will substantively be the only running program, so they will preload as much data as is reasonable, and be designed from the ground to get by with however much data can reasonably be preloaded. This involves short cuts and approximations, and accepting the change in expected behaviour. but most programs are not games, and don't fit that model. many applications can't trade accuracy for data size. other applications need to rely on permanent storage for data persistence as execution occurs to maintain state in the event of a crash or power failure. there can be many applications with these types of requirements running at the same time.
I'm really done now. -
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Macbook air 128GB SSD, true capacity?
Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by ThinkPaid, Jan 31, 2012.