So here we go – I used XBench.

No. 1 – OCZ Agility 2 E 240GB SSD

No. 2 – WD Caviar Black 1TB HD (installed by Apple, came w/ the Mac Pro)

No.3 – Cinebench OpenGL (Radeon 5770) (click to see it full size)

No. 4 – Cinebench 4C/8T Rendering (click to see it full size)

While it seems to be slower than an i7 when rendering, the Xeon behaves a lot better while working with VMs. I don’t even notice it’s running

No. 5 – Geekbench (on request by Ivor – Kudos )
Results on the Geekbench website
Result: 8809 (32bit)

I’m sure when “Kurumi” (that’s the name for the Mac Pro) has got all 16GB of RAM in the next days, it will boost the benchmarks a bit, again.

16GB UPDATE

No. 6 – Geekbench with 16GB RAM built in
Results on the Geekbench website
Result: 8868 (32bit)

No. 7 – XBench with 16GB RAM built in (OCZ SSD)

“There it is!” the guy at the Apple Store said and showed me the 11″ MacBook Air. Sweet, nice – seems to be unexpected fast – and they had it on stock. Since I had this “Icetea” desaster a few months ago, my old MacBook Alu 2GHz is not able to suspend into sleep mode when I close it. I need to do this manually. Also, the Ctrl key on the right does not work anymore. With a keymap tool I’m able to put this key to the left CMD key, which allows me to work in terminal and cancel stuff. But this also gives me headache to use apps like QuickSilver, depending on those shortcuts (no remapping worked so far). I’m very please with my old, but solid (if you keep in mind what happend) MacBook. I’d installed a Intel 80GB SSD which makes it very responsive.

When I had this MacBook Air in my hands, playing some online videos in the store and simply having it in hand rather than putting it on the table, I was los. “We have it on stock!”. Oh great – I’m screwed!

So, after a short discussion with @sorajaklein, I bought it and took it home.

Here are some unboxing photos.

I thought I don’t need to write about it on my blog, but now (it’s Saturday morning, 11:30am) and after some hours working with it, I think I have to.

First impression
The MacBook Air is very lightweight and is very sturdy the same time. It’s fun to close it down and simply move it around. It feels like having an iPad in the hands.

The screen is very good. It’s a LED backlighted screen (glossy) like all MacBooks have and – what should I say? The viewing angle is great. With 1366×768 on 11.6″ the pixels are very small. I guess they are a bit smaller than on my 27″ iMac. It took a moment to focus on them when opening it up this morning.

It does not have a harddisk, very good! 64GB of Apple own SSDs is built in and it’s awesome fast. While the CPU is just clocked at 1.4GHz, I would say the SSD makes what the can’t: give the real speed to the system. When you use it in a regular manner, it works great fast!

Battery life is extremely good! Not even that it seems to run very long (I’ve just finished XBench & Cinebench w/o having a power supply attached to the MacBook Air), it still shows me 4:21h to go! Wow! And I used it 30mins before I started those test.

Not that it just lasts very long, it’s also VERY quickly loaded. Surprisingly. I used it out of the box until it was drained to 10mins. I was finished with installing and setting up all the stuff I need (and that’s a lot), so after 3h’s of hardcore installations, backing up the complete stuff to my OS X Server wireless, it was nearly empty. In just 2h’s it was completely loaded! Bloody hell, guys, that’s superfast.

The keyboard is a more or less typical sized keyboard and for every wireless keyboard user or other MacBook * user it’s no big difference when it comes to the layout. BUT the keys are (and I think that’s because of the form factor) are a bit short bound, means: they keys itself are lower than on my previous MacBook and it feels a bit harder to press. Not sure if it’s worth mentioning it, but I find it currently a bit harder to type on it.

While my MacBook turns on the fans and screams when viewing a video in fullscreen after a minute, this fan in the MacBook Air is nice quiet. Even while running long and heavy CPU-using benchmarks, the fan keeps quiet.

What I find funny and very productive is that the trackpad is aligned to the 16:9 display, that’s very well done and makes working on this device much fun.

Using it
I’m a hardcore user, I admit. I love to play with different VMs, Aperture, some video cutting and a hundred opened windows on my screen coding in them my PHP stuff. But that’s not a reason for a MacBook Air, even not for a regular MacBook, not sure if it’s a reason for the fastest MacBook Pro available. I love to do this stuff on my iMac and my mobile device is for showing my customers stuff I’ve done, sitting in the living room, coding until late night, surfing around and keeping it with me on the road and doing some first Aperture stuff on my photos. That’s what I need a MacBook for. My old MacBook does this job ok when I had the HDD in it, upgrading to the SSD gave the whole system a huge kick and it was great to work with it. I mentioned why I was thinking about a switch already in the intro, keys, sleep mode etc.. Nether the less, my little “Dawn” works fantastic except those issues.

Video playback
A friend asked me last night if I could test playback of 1080p videos on the MacBook Air. Sure! I downloaded the stuff via WiFi from our local server where I have some files to test this. That’s by the way something that is a bit annoying – not having a an option for GBit ethernet. After getting this testfile (9GB) after 30mins onto the local SSD, I started VLC and – it stucks. Uh – it stucks evil. So: playback of 1080p is a bit too much for this little beauty.

The next file I tried was a 720p video which works flawlessly. No interrupts, no stucking – simply works smooth.

I tried another 1080p file to be sure it was not the file itself: the result was better – but after a minute, it starts to stuck again.

The MacBook Air is fine for 720p video, but that seems to be the maximum of this CPU & GPU combination.

Aperture
While I don’t think that I need FullHD 1080p video on a mobile device, I need Aperture. I’m falling in love with doing photos when I’m on the road, the DSRL and my 3 different lenses are always in my baggage.

I’ve installed Aperture with the help of my iMac, with DVD-Sharing and this works awesome good! I’ve also done that with iWork ’09.

I started Aperture after a fresh reboot to be sure to get the best possible test results, plugged in the cardreader (CF card in my Sony Alpha 300) and copied the RAW (ARW) files over to the MacBook Air. I’ve done the exact same stuff I’ve done last night; editing the MacBook Air unboxing photos in the same manner.

The result is not surprising honestly, the CPU gauge in iStat menus hits the top permanently and even viewing a RAW file took a few seconds until it’s filly rendered. That’s maybe fine if you do this in a private way and just have to deal with a few photos like I do, if you are a professional, don’t even think about it. I could live with that, but compared to my MacBook, it’s very slow.

Benchmarking
It seems to be a bit unfair to crucify this little beauty that much, but I ran an XBench and a Cinebench – here are the results.

XBench Log:
Results 122.09
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.6.4 (10F3061)
Physical RAM 2048 MB
Model MacBookAir3,1
Drive Type APPLE SSD TS064C
CPU Test 96.34
GCD Loop 160.39 8.45 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 75.48 1.79 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 64.00 2.11 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 155.97 27.16 Mops/sec
Thread Test 180.68
Computation 215.55 4.37 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 155.52 6.69 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 132.66
System 137.03
Allocate 188.27 691.40 Kalloc/sec
Fill 111.13 5403.24 MB/sec
Copy 131.88 2723.88 MB/sec
Stream 128.56
Copy 123.10 2542.68 MB/sec
Scale 121.13 2502.57 MB/sec
Add 136.70 2911.91 MB/sec
Triad 134.75 2882.72 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test 98.32
Line 92.11 6.13 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 101.29 30.24 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 87.72 7.15 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 103.96 2.62 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 109.81 6.87 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 93.68
Spinning Squares 93.68 118.84 frames/sec
User Interface Test 115.12
Elements 115.12 528.36 refresh/sec
Disk Test 229.85
Sequential 147.25
Uncached Write 211.40 129.80 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 181.60 102.75 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 70.98 20.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 352.11 176.97 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 523.52
Uncached Write 310.38 32.86 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 509.61 163.14 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 1393.04 9.87 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 575.20 106.73 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Cinebench:

Click to open the benchmark in a new tab/window in full size

Personal resumé
I like it, I already gave it the name “Pebbles” and it’s super sweet and cute, but, after a couple of hours using it, I admit that it’s not my next MacBook. It simply does great tasks, but I don’t see a big benefit compared to my current MacBook. Even if this one has it issues and problems, I like it and the SSD inside “Dawn” makes it feel faster than this sweet little MacBook Air.

Luckily the guy in the Apple Store told me that I could return it within 14 days. Well, I will return it today and keep my old but trusty MacBook and for the money I get back, I will buy myself I dream: a 27″ Cinema Display for my iMac, so that I could stop working with non-glossy and glossy screen mixed and have a lot more screen real estate (yikes! This means that I again have to take office photos ).

If I wouldn’t already have a great MacBook, I would keep it. That’s for sure, but the difference/benefits between the MacBook Air and my old MacBook is not given.

Recommendation
If you are a user that surfs, do less photo editing, maybe with iPhoto and create texts like blogging, or simply coding tasks, I would say the MacBook Air 11″ is right for you.

But if you want to use it for heavier stuff, rethink of getting a MacBook Pro. It’s not much more expensive and has a lot more power to offer.

All shown photos are available in a higher resolution on my flickr account.

What is Belldandy?

Belldandy is a name of a fictional person, used in the Manga “Oh! My goddess“, one of my favorite comics. Reading this post, you will see that I use more japanese comic names for virtual machines.

But what is YOUR Belldandy?

Well, Belldandy is the name of my newest server. I write “newest”, because over the years I tried so much different systems and types of servers, that I’m really happy to announce a very stable server here.

What kind of server is it?

It’s a self-build one, but I used hardware parts that where recommended from Constantin Gonzalez from Sun. I’m using my old but very reliable TAGAN 450W power supply, an ASUS M4A78LT-M AMD mainboard which supports ECC memory and 6GB of ECC RAM. The OS harddisk is a new 160GB IDE HD. It’s not a 19″ server – it’s a regular Midi tower (MESH series by Chieftec).

Why IDE? Isn’t this a rather old standard? What about SATA?

I’m using all 6 onboard SATA ports for the zpool. IDE may be an old standard, but it works fine for the OS itself. With 6GB of RAM I don’t think too much about HD IOs on this HD. It’s more important, that the zpools are bound to a fast bus. I simply found it a waste of an port using a SATA HD for the system.

So you’ve 6 HDs inside the server?

Yes! I’ve installed 6x 1TB WD “Green” HDs into the server. Those are connected to the zpool “storage” which is the main storage of the server.

What is that “zpool”?

zpool is pool of HDs you’ve virtually stacked into one large virtual HD. It’s widely comparable to RAID, but it offers a lot advantages compared to a traditional RAID. I’m using 3x Mirror drives. Each mirror contains 2 HDs with the capacity of 1TB each. Together, because they are internally mirrored, I’ve 50% of the capacity. If you want to learn more about zpool and ZFS, I could highly recommend googling for it – there are tons of interesting and funny material out there.

Why do you mirror? Are your HDs so bad?

No It’s a thing of security for my data. Harddisks are not made forever and the fail. The question is just: When. Having a mirror protects my data from getting lost when one or more HDs are crashing the same time. Of course, if it’s a series issue, maybe I’m also not secured against this – 3 HDs where bought at the same day, but I think it’s a very way which let’s me sleep deep.

Which OS is that? Linux?

No, I’m running OpenSolaris which is something between Linux and UNIX, I would think it contains the best of both worlds. It’s mainly based on Sun’s Solaris but with a GNome environment. It’s a great system, but I’m also rather new to it, so I need to learn a lot about it. It’s amazingly pretty easy to create storages and zpools.

How do you connect to your server from your clients?

I’ve installed netatalk on the OpenSolaris machine to be able to use it with our Macs. It’s pretty much forward. A bad idea is to use SMB and Macs, there seems to be a bug inside the Finder’s SMB implementation. Anyway – it’s cool to have AFP running (netatalk).

Of course, I could always use the SCP protocol to connect to the server if I need to, but that’s more useful for the administration than for normal usage.

Isn’t it loud? Have you stored it in your office?

It’s really too loud as I’ve installed 4 very efficient fans into the server. I had it for a couple of days in our office and it was not very comfortable, so we decided to putit into the basement. I honestly prefer a quiet office (even music sometimes annoys me and I’m working mostly in silence).

You have some external boxes on that desk – what are they for?

The bigger box is a great box – it is my Onnto DataTale. It allows me to put 4 HDs into and comes with a hardware RAID. I’ve currently installed 4x 640GB WD Blue HDs and connected it via eSATA to the server to store temporary data onto. It gives me 1.8TB of usable storage.

What are these other 4 boxes for?

That’s (from left to right) a Seagate Desktop drive, a MacPower enclosure with another 1TB Seagate HD inside and 2 Hitachi external HDs. They are all connected via a USB2-Hub to the server and are set up as an RAIDz1 backup zpool. It gives me 2.7TB of available storage for backing up our data. RAIDz1 is more or less comparable with RAID5.

How do you connect the server to the internet, or is it an offline server for local use only?

It’s connected directly to the internet and out 2 DSL lines. OpenSolaris itself is connected to the Vodafone line which offers a fix IP and NO disconnect every 24h’s, so it’s a real and cheap dedicated line. It gives me 6MBit/s download and 640KBit/s upload. So or so, I don’t run any services on the host system itself for protection. The other line is from the Deutsche Telekom and allows us to surf with 16MBit/s (1MBit/s upstream). This is mostly used for the clients only.

Do you run any virtual machine on the server?

Yes, indeed. I run 2x Debian (“Urd” & “Mila”) (one as development machine for my web design & development, the other as media streaming device (namely Firefly iTunes server or “mt-daapd)). I also run a Windows Server (“Miyuki”) on the server as mailserver. It’s a Windows Server 2008 r2 x64 with an Exchange 2010 installed on top of it. If Microsoft creates a great product, it’s in my mind Exchange. And I say that as Mac user

Which software do you use to virtualize this stuff?

Sun gives away their virtualization software VirtualBox for free – and of course it runs fantastic on their own OpenSolaris. I’m very happy that it runs so well.

On my clients we run Parallels on my Mac Pro for Windows virtualization and my wife is running a VMWare Fusion on her MacBook for Windows 7.

Do you have a firewall installed in your rack?

Yes and no, I’ve a IBM NetVista mounted inside the rack. It’s a very small and slow machine – a Thin Client – but it’s fantastic to run IPCop on. Currently, because it was a long road to get to this very satisfying server, it’s switched off, but I will turn it on again soon, and even if it’s for local proxy, free DNS servers and local DNS (don’t you guys also hate to type IPs for LAN servers? ).

How much HD capacity/usable capacity have you attached to Belldandy?

- 6x 1 TB internal
- 1x 160 GB internal
- 4x 640 GB external
- 4x 1 TB external

Makes around about 12 TB of storage, I can use up to 7,8 TB for real storage. There’s a lot of overhead for security, but I think it’s really worth it. ZFS as filesystem itself is very secure, but in this combination, it’s fantastic and I’m really looking forward to have a permanent server. In case I want to try something else, I will now simply create a new VM to play with instead of killing the server itself.

Do you run Linux anywhere?

I do! “Obelix” – my dedicated webserver runs Debian Lenny, the 2 virtual machines are also both Debian and IPCop is also based on Linux. I would say, I’m using a good mix of the different operating systems.

Many thanks for reading this post! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed typing it

Ciao
Dennis