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[jmone]

FYI - I just purchased a MacBook Air 11" (on a two week trial / return) and have blown away the iOS partition, installed Win7 and so far I'm pretty impressed - playing HD Video just fine and seems to work perfectly with MC - More at http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1647958

[glynor]

Just a tip... It would be much more useful if you kept that OSX partition intact, but small.  OSX is pretty clever sometimes, so why not have access to it if you only need to dedicate 10-20GB or so to the partition?

Oh, and by the way, if you do this... Don't use MacDrive (which constantly corrupted my OSX installation disks when I used it from inside Boot Camp).  Instead, go the other way, NTFS For OSX from Paragon Software works brilliantly on my Macs to let me read/write to NTFS disks.  Since I default-boot to Win7 on my Macbook, I keep the NTFS partition "huge" and just read/write to it from OSX via the Paragon driver (which is transparent to the user, once installed, NTFS disks "just work").

You can also use the very nice WinClone App for OSX to keep nice backup images of your Win7 install partitions, and Carbon Copy Cloner to image your OSX install onto an external USB stick or drive (which are bootable on OSX).  I typically keep a second 2.5" hard drive lying around for my Macbook with a full image of my entire system (OSX and Windows partitions) ready-to-go.  If anything happens, I swap in the second drive, boot, and I'm on my way again nearly immediately.

[jmone]

Thanks Glynor - as I've 0 interest in OSX and the HDD is SSD HDD is only 56GB formatted (down to 38GB free after my installs) I've gone the 100% pure Win7 option.  I still have the OSX recovery key if I need it but I'm note sure why I would anyway.  Final thing is to get a transparrant Windows 7 Sticker to put over the glowing Apple Logo!

[glynor]

When I wrote that I was actually thinking: "the only reason I'd do that is if it were running a very small SSD".

For what it's worth... Small SSDs like that are usually actually fairly crippled in speed (because they reduce the number of flash controllers when they lower the capacity).  You'd see much better results with a 120-128GB drive.  The Corsair Nova is supposed to be very good.

[jmone]

Yeah I thought of the higher spec one but all I need is a small, light, tough unit for work and it was another $400 to bump to 4GB of RAM and 128GB SDD which I don't "think" I need. 

Here are some various "scores: on this
- JR Mark 953 (Math 702, Image 831, Database 1237)

Windows Experience = 4.1
- Processor: 4.1
- Memory: 4.9
- Graphics: 4.9
- Gaming graphics: 6.0
- Primary Hard Disk: 6.9

HDD reports as 56.3GB (now with 38GB free and this is with Win7 Ultimate 32-Bit, Office Pro, some other apps, with about 2gb of data loaded)

Memory usage has been good with Task Mgr reporting 1.05MB in use after being running for the last three hours with MC playing music, Word, Outlook, Explorer and IE all running...details are
- Total: 1,782 (the 320m will be grabbing stuff out the the 2GB)
- Cached: 731
- Available: 701
- Free: 0

Note: after a reboot, Task Mgr reporting 1.05MB in use:
- Total: 1,782 (the 320m will be grabbing stuff out the the 2GB)
- Cached: 435
- Available: 1,126
- Free: 695

More importantly it will play Blu-ray discs just fine thanks to the HA on the 320m (the C2D is not powerful enough to play HR stuff without GPU HA).

[jmone]

When I wrote that I was actually thinking: "the only reason I'd do that is if it were running a very small SSD".

I did it cause it is just a waste of space (regardless of the size of the HDD), for me no better than any other MFR's bloatware of stuff I'll never use (I liked the HW not the OS).  If it was a WinTel setup I could even gets some $'s back for not using Windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_refund)...you think Apple will give me a similar refund? 

For what it's worth... Small SSDs like that are usually actually fairly crippled in speed (because they reduce the number of flash controllers when they lower the capacity).

I'm pretty impressed with quick Boot and HDD transfer speeds on this thing (it's quicker than the stuff serving it anyway).

[glynor]

Most SSDs that don't have a brain-dead controller will perform better than even a fast conventional hard drive, especially at random reads.  Check out this great round up of hard drives and SSDs that Tech Report did a month or so back for the launch of the new WD Scorpio Black 750 (WD's 750GB 7200rpm 2.5" drive).

Most of the 60-64GB drives out now will end up performing roughly like the 40GB Intel drive in those charts.  Some will be a little better, others a little worse (and it will, of course, depend on the particular metric).  So, still better than a conventional hard drive, but SSDs can be REALLY fast.  The smaller drives can be quite crippled in write speeds (the Intel 40 is probably a tad worse at writes than the 64GB models in many cases).  But then, look at those access times on the next page...   

If you're satisfied, though, I'd wait to expand that SSD anyway.  The next gen Intel drives are really around the corner (you can't get most of the 2nd gen ones anymore), and I expect them to drive prices down with this release.