Upgrade Your Macbook Air 2010 SSD Harddisk Drive
Being a techie, spotting this piece of news is weirdly more exciting than celebrating Lunar New Year at grandma’s. I recently bought the Macbook Air 11″ with the 64GB SSD version and honestly no complains whatsoever BUT indeed having a 64GB disk space is like a trip back to early millennium where you don’t have 720p/1080p videos, tonnes of big applications and graphics hungry games: it’s just isn’t enough, well that is if you are using your laptop for these purposes. Fortunately I don’t, I used laptops primarily for mobile work and presentations and that’s about it.
Here’s the good news for you peeps out there who uses your Macbook Air for multimedia stuff or gaming in particular. OWC has announced their latest SSD expansion option for Macbook Air 2010 edition, they called it Mercury Aura Pro Express, and even include useful installation videos to show you how to. As we all know Apple has stripped down the SSD harddisk into a piece of RAM-like hardware to make the Macbook Air the slimmest yet, however making it impossible to upgrade using conventional sized SSD harddisks. But that didn’t stop OWC from making their own version of the upgrade and they come in 3 sizes: 180GB, 240GB and 360GB to satisfy even the most demanding situations.
There is a catch though, these expansion SSD drives offered by OWC don’t come cheap. At US$499.99, US$579.99 and US$1179.99 for 180/240/360GB respectively, off my mind here are a few comparisons for the price of upgrades based on per GB:
Macbook Air 11″
- 64GB upgrade to 128GB(*Apple) – S$4.69 per GB
- 64GB upgrade to 180GB(OWC) – S$3.60 per GB
- 64GB upgrade to 240GB(OWC) – S$3.14 per GB
- 64GB upgrade to 360GB(OWC) – S$4.26 per GB
Macbook Air 13″
- 128GB upgrade to 256GB(*Apple) – S$3.43 per GB
- 128GB upgrade to 240GB(OWC) – S$3.14 per GB
- 128GB upgrade to 360GB(OWC) – S$4.26 per GB
*I could only compare the Apple upgrades according to the price difference between the models. Looking at the numbers, it makes more sense to upgrade to 240GB being the most cost-effective option. Note also that when you purchase OWC expansion options you get to keep the old Apple’s SSD drive and from what I’ve read OWC plans to offer a buyback option, though I’m not sure about international purchases. OWC also claims that their SSD drives(driven by SandForce SF1200 processor) are 22% faster than Apple default drives besides the other advantages listed below:
- Designed & built in the US from domestic & imported parts.
- Chip Based Data Encryption: 128-bit AES-compliant.
- Intelligent “recycling” for advanced free space management.
- Best in class error correction (ECC) and SandForce RAISE™ (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) technology provides RAID-like data protection and reliability without loss of transfer speed due to parity.
- SandForce® Processor with 7% over-provisioning maximizes read and write performance to greatly extend the endurance and overall reliability of the drive.
- Up to 100X greater data protection than what the highest rated enterprise class conventional hard disk drive (HDD) provides.
- SandForce DuraClass™ technology with Ultra-efficient Block Management & Wear Leveling offers highest endurance, performance and power efficiency in a SSD.
The ability to upgrade the SSD drives on Macbook Air 2010 is definitely a welcomed option despite the towering prices and that does somehow take away the perception of the Macbook Air having a small harddisk limitation. The OWC SSD drives are out of my budget for now but it would definitely become a possibility when prices do come down in the future.
P.S FYI, I have purchased and used OWC Extreme Pro SSD before on my HTPC in a previous article.