Confusion on new model and whether it will work for me! Please help!

[J.walker08]

So I am a little confused with this flash storage. I'm not a techie, so please excuse the ignorance.

I use my current laptop for music (about 8,000 songs), photos (3,000 photos), movies, etc. Will the flash be able to hold all this... say about 30gb of stuff. Also, is it reliable, or is it likely I will loose my work, etc. I am in college, so I do a lot of paper writing, sometimes 20-40 pages, and I don't really want to loose any work?

Also, I'm confused if the lower end would be an upgrade or not, as it has lower Ghz. My current model has 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 1 GB MHZ DDR2 SDRAM. Would I notice an improvement from my current mac to the new air?

Thanks for the help guys!

 

[miles01110]

Will the flash be able to hold all this... say about 30gb of stuff.

Since 64 GB > 30 GB, yes, it will hold it all.

Also, is it reliable, or is it likely I will loose my work, etc. I am in college, so I do a lot of paper writing, sometimes 20-40 pages, and I don't really want to loose any work?

No piece of technology is fail-proof, but flash storage is more reliable than the platter-based storage used in the Macbook Pros.

My current model has 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 1 GB MHZ DDR2 SDRAM. Would I notice an improvement from my current mac to the new air?

No.

 

[Tomorrow]

I use my current laptop for music (about 8,000 songs), photos (3,000 photos), movies, etc. Will the flash be able to hold all this... say about 30gb of stuff. Also, is it reliable, or is it likely I will loose my work, etc. I am in college, so I do a lot of paper writing, sometimes

If you already have 30 Gb of stuff, I'd get the larger storage model.

I highlighted the reliability element above for this reason: flash, SSD, or conventional hard disk aside, you need a backup solution. Please listen to me on this.

 

[poloponies]

1GB of storage is 1GB of storage, be it on a hard drive or flash memory. The lowest-end MBA has 64GB of flash, so doing the math 64GB > 30GB. As for the rest of your question, what do you need to do that your current model can't? Buying new just for the sake of buying new isn't always a great idea.

 

[Stetrain]

You would probably notice an improvement in performance because of the flash memory. The processor is slower, but it has more RAM. The flash memory means you will have much faster boot times, apps will open more quickly, and generally any sort of loading / copying times will be much quicker.

Good flash memory is much faster than a traditional magnetic spinning hard drive. It's also more reliable since it has no moving parts. Many laptops (including Apple's) have had the option for a while now to replace the normal drive with a flash based one. It's the same type of memory used in iPhones and iPads and I haven't heard of any problems with files going missing etc.

As far as space, it depends. The base operating system and apps will probably take 5-10gb. For a 64gb drive with your 30gb of music, that leaves about 24gb of free space for others apps and such that you might install, which is cutting it a bit close. You would probably be better off to go with the 128gb model or to put your music and movies on an external drive that you would just plug in to the USB port.

 

[fyrefly]

I'd say you will definitely see an improvement, just 'cause of the SSD.

It's really the single easiest speed increase they can do for laptops right now.

I have a 1.6Ghz Air RevB with SSD and it matches pretty much any non-SSD MacBook model, 'cept for the 2GB RAM ceiling.