- MACBOOK AIR SSD UPGRADE 2011 MAC OS X
- MACBOOK AIR SSD UPGRADE 2011 UPDATE
- MACBOOK AIR SSD UPGRADE 2011 PRO
There are no other SSDs suitable for 2010-2011 MBAs, unless you find an original part on eBay. For most people, there is no reason to upgrade the SSD but in case you have for example the base 11" with 64GB SSD and more space is needed, OWC's offerings might come handy. Hence OWC's Aura 6G SSD should guarantee a healthy performance boost in disk intensive tasks, although the difference will most likely be negligible in everyday operations.
MACBOOK AIR SSD UPGRADE 2011 PRO
In January, OWC released Mercury Aura Pro Express 3G series for 2010 MacBook Airs so this announcement is a logical follow-up of that. The SATA interface in 2011 MBAs is 6Gb/s, but Apple is using 3Gb/s SSDs. Prices are $350 and $600 respectively and they ship in 24 hours. OWC claims speeds of up to 507MB/s read and 454MB/s write, which is about twice as fast as what the Samsung SSD used in some MBAs provides. The SSD controller is the same as found in OWC's Mercury 6G SSDs: SF-2281. The SSDs are branded as Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G and come in capacities of 120GB and 240GB. For anyone considering a ultraportable notebook, it’s difficult to beat the current line of MacBook Air products.OWC has released SSD upgrades suitable for Apple's MacBook Air ( our 2011 review). The other new touches are nice too, the backlit keyboard is great for low-light work, and the keyboard in general is a bit less springy than before. Overall, the new SSD seems to perform well, in anecdotal testing the revised MacBook Air handles things like streaming HD video much better, where the prior generation quickly spun the fan into high gear and started stuttering during playback under heavy load. The 256K benchmarks saw mixed results, the new SSD picks up almost 40 MB/s on the read speeds but gives up the same amount on the writes. The 4K writes were where the old drive performed the worst and thankfully the new one is much better, going from 29.82 MB/s to a hair over 80 MB/s, a very welcome improvement. The 4K read speeds are incrementally better with the new drive, up about 10%. Switching to 256K, we found writes of 126.05 MB/s and reads of 141.13 MB/s.
In random transfers the new Apple SSD saw 4K write speeds of 80.78 MB/s and reads of 12.86 MB/s. On the 256K tests the writes saw a modest improvement and the reads about 50 MB/s. Compared to our prior generation Air, there are massive gains in the 4K tests, the 4K read speeds for instance nearly doubled and the 4K writes were up 100 MB/s. When switching to 256K, the writes go to 194.80 MB/s and reads 212.40 MB/s. For sequential transfers, we saw 4K writes of 210.97 MB/s and reads of 29.21 MB/s. While not exactly apples to apples, this does at least paint a picture of what users can expect from the new SSD. With the new processors, more RAM and potentially improved SSD, how does this notebook compare to the prior generation? We ran the Xbench1.3 drive benchmarks to compare both to the previous generation MacBook Air SSD and the OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express SSD upgrade.
The question on the minds of potential MacBook Air buyers though is around performance. The NAND is 32GB in capacity, totaling 128GB over four chips, giving the end user 121.33GB of usable space. The RAM and NAND are also Samsung branded, marked as K4T2G6314QE-MCF7 and K9PFGD8U7M respectively. The controller is Samsung sourced, with the markings S3C29MAX01-Y340. When we get down to the component level, we see Apple has opted for all Samsung components, which are also found in the Samsung 470 SSD reviewed last year. Aside from name changes, physically the drives are very similar, Apple maintains the stick-of-gum SSD design. The new SSD is called Apple SSD SM128C, where the previous generation was called Apple SSD TS128C.
MACBOOK AIR SSD UPGRADE 2011 UPDATE
The screenshot below is from the new MacBook Air, but it looks roughly the same on prior generation MacBook Air notebooks with the Lion update applied.Ī quick glance at the drive details shows TRIM support and a new model number for the SSD. Lion reportedly does hundreds of new or improved things, one of which is now support of TRIM for SSDs. Perhaps one of the most important complaints about SSDs and Apple in general was resolved with the Lion operating system update. We’re most interested in the MacBook Air’s SSD though we quickly tore down the 128GB MacBook Air to see what’s inside in this mini-review.
MACBOOK AIR SSD UPGRADE 2011 MAC OS X
There were few surprises when Apple updated the MacBook Air line yesterday, adding a faster Intel Core i5 processor, more RAM, backlit keyboard and a few other goodies like a Thunderbolt port and Mac OS X Lion.
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