The OWC drive is much faster than any external drive, even if it is an SSD or a large capacity flash memory stick. Of course that drive did only cost us $100, but it is slow. It is a little annoying to keep up with another drive. We’ve been carrying around a slow 500GB WD external USB drive.
Others have 128GB or 256GB of storage, but even that 256GB can get cramped quickly.Īnother reason to perform this upgrade is to avoid carrying around an external drive.
Many MacBook Airs only came with 64GB of storage. The first reason is as we said above – space. One might wonder why anyone would bother to open their computer and upgrade. We upgraded a 13.3″ MacBook Air that came with a 256GB SSD to 480GB thanks to the OWC 480GB Mercury Aura Pro Express Solid State Drive. We tested and will demonstrate the upgrade to the 480GB model. The Mercury Extreme Pro SSDs come in capacities of either 240GB or 480GB. This likely will void your warranty with Apple, but they also likely won’t notice if you have to return it and put back the stock SSD. For a pretty penny you can crack open the MacBook Air and upgrade that SSD to one of a higher capacity thanks to OWC and their new SSD upgrades. The drives also limit your storage capacity because solid state storage is much more expensive per gigabyte than traditional optical spinning hard drives. That is what gives you your system’s speed. These computers come with fast SSDs instead of hard drives. They have released an upgrade path for both the 11.6″ and 13.3″ 2010 MacBook Air ultraportables. Also included are installation tools, a heat sink, a USB cable, and an Envoy Pro carrying case.If your 64GB 11.6″ MacBook Air is filling up with your content and software, OWC has a solution. The Aura Pro X2 comes complete with an Envoy Pro external enclosure that enables you to use your Mac's original flash SSD as a fast, external USB drive with transfer speeds up to 426 MB/s. Additionally, the Aura Pro X2 is calibrated to consume only 5.7W during operation and to run cool.
The drive reserves 7% of the overall capacity as free space to perform background maintenance tasks that optimize the health, performance, and endurance of your flash drive.
The Aura Pro X2 is designed for macOS High Sierra 10.13 and later, taking full advantage of the advanced features of APFS including strong encryption, copy-on-write metadata, space sharing, cloning for files and directories, snapshots, fast directory sizing, atomic safe-save primitives, and improved file system fundamentals. The drive uses 3D TLC synchronous NAND flash memory with advanced SLC caching to deliver sequential data read and write speeds of up to 15 MB/s respectively�up to twice as fast as the factory-installed drives. Designed for installation in a Mac Pro desktop computer (late 2013), this internal flash/SSD drive upgrade features a PCIe 3.1 x4, NVMe 1.3 interface and a custom blade form factor. Keep your edge with the Aura Pro X2 480GB NVMe SSD Upgrade Kit from OWC / Other World Computing.