MacBook Air SSD and Battery Benchmarked

The Wall Street Journal benchmarked the solid state drive (SDD) of the MacBook Air against the hard disk drive (HDD) version. Unlike what one would expect, the battery life is only 5 minutes higher. When it comes to boot-up time, the SDD performs 40% faster, but given that the HDD boots in less than a minute, so the perceived gains aren’t worth the extra cost.

Anantech did benchmark the battery, and here are the raw results:

• WiFi browsing + music: 4.27hrs
• DVD playback: 3.42hrs
• Xvid playback+ web browsing + heavy file download: 2.43hrs

It’s actually pretty good in my opinion. my Vaio SZ dies a lot faster than that, regardless of what I do.