Our Verdict
TheMacBook Airhas succeed over a large number of Apple laptop computer users . But in lodge to offer such uttermost portability , the MacBook Air comes with a few tradeoffs . One of those tradeoff is with the flash repositing — it ’s fast , but it ’s expensive , and to keep the cost down , Apple is a bit stingy with the amount of flash storage it makes available in the received MacBook Air configurations . With the ultra - sparse laptop ’s storage space graze from a minuscule 64 GB to an underwhelming 256 Gi , it ’s no wonderment that some MacBook Air lovers want to increase the capacity , no matter the toll .
If you may afford it , OWCoffers storage upgrades for the mid-2010 MacBook Air poser . TheMercury Aura Pro Expressis available in capacities graze from 180 GB for $ 470 to a 480 GB model for $ 1580 , which is $ 20 less than the Leontyne Price of the high - oddment 13 - in MacBook Air with 256 GB of New York minute storage .
( Apple refer to the storage machine in the mid-2010 MacBook Air asflash storage , not as a solid - state campaign , or SSD . The storage gimmick in the MacBook Air seem similar to a RAM module , but with the connectors on the short bound instead of the tenacious border . The SSDs available in older MacBook Airs , MacBook Pros , iMacs , and Mac Pros occur in a typical 2.5 - in notebook computer movement parcel . OWC refers to the Mercury Aura Pro Express as SSDs , though they have a similar design as the flash storage include with the MacBook Air . )
Startup results are in seconds; lower is better. All other results as megabytes per second; higher is better. Best results inbold.
Macworld Lab received a180 GB Mercury Aura Pro Expressand installed it in the 11 - column inch MacBook Air that came with 64 GB of flashgun storage . The installing process is relatively simple ( peculiarly when compared to raise the iMac ’s drive ) , and OWC provides the necessary creature . unluckily , there ’s not much that can be done with the stock flash storage once it ’s remove , unless someone begin selling an outside enclosing .
Once the storage upgrade was installed , we found the added content to be a blessing , but our public presentation results were accidentally mixed . The selling material for the Mercury Aura Pro Express claim that the effort offer up to 68 pct faster performance than the stock flash storage . to see such a Brobdingnagian a difference between the MacBook Air ’s flash warehousing and the Mercury Aura Pro Express , we had to utilise automate tests that task the MacBook Air in ways that most people would n’t use an radical - portable . With theAJA System Test , which is used to see how well your system would perform with the AJA computer hardware working with HD video in real metre , we found telling speed improvements , with the Mercury Aura Pro Express posting 13 pct quicker write speeds and 26 percent faster take speeds than the MacBook Air ’s stock 64 GB jiffy storage . We also watch up to 47 percent faster average read speed and 32 percentage quick mediocre write speed using the Fill Disk tests on diglloydTools’DiskTester .
Benchmarks: Mercury Aura Pro Express
Startup result are in seconds ; lowly is better . All other results as megabytes per second ; higher is good . Best results inbold .
However , when we tested withSpeedmark 6.5 , our program - base bench mark rooms , the results shew piffling or no benefit with OWC ’s drive . The MacBook Air with the OWC rising slope finished encoding MP3s in iTunes a little more than 5 pct faster than the lineage twist and exported a pic in iMovie about 3 percent quicker . Startup prison term and Finder tests , like data file duplicate and unzipping a 2 GB folder archive , were actually wearisome on the OWC than on the MacBook Air with its stock flash storage .
We contacted OWC to discuss our results . The caller responded by directing us to test resolution from other land site , such asArs Technica , Cult of Mac , andNotebooks.com , which mostly used synthetic tests . Our own synthetic tests show result that were alike to theirs , but we did n’t see the same results in our software tests .
In case you ’re concerned , we recently compared the velocity of aflash - storage equipped MacBook Air and the concentrated driveway equipped MacBook Pro .
Speedmark results are a score ; higher is better . All other results are second ; lower is better . Best result inbold .
All final result are arcsecond ; low is proficient . Best result inbold .
If you ’re a MacBook Air user who needs a serious boost to the laptop ’s storage capacity , the Mercury Aura Pro Express SSDs are worth a looking . But if what you ’re looking for is an overall stop number boost , our tests suggest that these drive wo n’t have much shock in everyday consumption .
[ James Galbraith is Macworld ’s research laboratory music director . ]
