by Much of the attention circling the new MacBook Air has focused on Intel’s new Haswell processors and the considerable improvements to battery life they provide, but it’s possible that the most impressive improvement is the PCIe-based flash memory in each unit. Indeed, it may be even more impressive that we originally thought, and that means great things for the new Mac Pros that will be housing them as well. According to a report by Anandtech released this morning, read/write speeds are approaching 800 mb/s on the new 13″ MacBook Air.
According to Anandtech reporter Anand Lal Shimpi, “The drive in my system uses a Samsung controller, although I’ve heard that SanDisk will have a PCIe solution for Apple as well. A quick run through Quick Bench reveals peak sequential read/write performance of nearly 800MB/s. This is a pretty big deal, as it is probably the first step towards PCIe storage in a mainstream consumer device that we’ve seen.”
Source: Anandtech
Shimpi wasn’t the only one to be impressed by the new speeds. As 9to5 Mac notes, French site MacBidouille was so blown away with the speeds that they initially thought a bug must have been causing a problem with the software. On a related note, MacRumors noted this morning that the new MacBook Air models on display at WWDC were performing three to eight percent better than previous models.
In the past, MacBook Airs reached speeds of 600 mb/s at best under the SATA 3 interface. The difference in speed is attributable to the PCIe flash’s ability to connect directly to the motherboard.
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