The new 13 ″ MacBook Air from 2015 features an incredibly fast SSD-PCIe drive

This Monday Apple updated their MacBook Air line in which the new Intel Broadwell CPUs and a new Intel HD 6000 graphics chip were integrated. Both models, both the 11 ″ and 13 ″ models received the same processor updates, but also the 13-inch MacBook Air received an addition additional, a new kind of PCIe-based flash storage in which Apple claimed that it is up to two times faster than the one used in the previous generation. However unfortunately the 11-inch model has not received the same update as far as flash storage is concerned.

Because of this, the famous iFixit website, which spends time disassembling different Apple devices to create user-friendly guides, decided to test first-hand that categorical statement of "up to twice as fast" that Apple used as claim to new buyers. This was accomplished by comparing SSD read / write speeds between one of the new 11-inch MacBook Airs and the recent 13 ″ MacBook Air from 2015.

Indeed at the end of the tests they showed that it was almost twice as fast. Specifically, the average write speeds for the 11-inch MacBook Air model with Black Magic Disk Speed ​​Test were 315MB / s in writing while the average read speeds were 668MB / s, some really fast speeds but nonetheless the new 13-inch model pulverized them. The largest model reached a speed of 629.9MB / s average write with an average read speed of 1285.4MB / s… impressive.

IFixit's teardown of the 13-inch MacBook Air revealed that the team would be using a Samsung flash memory with a Samsung controller. On the other hand, the teardown of the 11-inch model that does not have this speed upgrade, was equipped with a SanDisk flash memory and a Marvell controller.

In short, it is incredible to see how the optimization of flash memory advances to reach breakneck speeds, the only thing that remains to be seen is that the degradation by writing and cyclical deletions of information is at the same level to finish equating itself with traditional disks, in addition of course a drop in the price per gigabyte in storage. If these two points happen at some point (it is on the right track) we can dismiss the HDDs almost certainly.