mighuel

big said:

I'm not a tech-head so I don't know and am asking honestly: how fast is the RAM the MBP ships with and how does the SSD speeds quoted in this article compare? I can't imagine SSDs are as fast as physical RAM - but I don't know! Does it seem likely that paging to SSD will be as quick as having more physical RAM if the architecture permitted it?

While these new SSDs are extremely fast they are nowhere near the speed of modern DDR3 ram. New Macbook Pros probably have ram bandwidth around 15-20GB/s. Having said that these SSDs certainly improve paging dramatically but don't quite eliminate the need of more ram in heavy use scenarios.

I hear somewhat similar very faint noise coming from my macbook pro when ssd is put under heavy load (like installing os update or something involving lots of small read/write operations). Back when I was wondering what's going on I googled it and found out that it was fairly common thing to happen with ssd drives. Could it be possible that the sound is actually coming from ssd and not A10? The guy who recorded that clip was restoring from backup so that would put some pressure on the ssd.