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- #2010 macbook air ssd upgrade how to#
- #2010 macbook air ssd upgrade upgrade#
- #2010 macbook air ssd upgrade pro#
- #2010 macbook air ssd upgrade mac#
In order to see such a vast a difference between the MacBook Air’s flash storage and the Mercury Aura Pro Express, we had to use automated tests that task the MacBook Air in ways that most people wouldn’t use an ultra-portable. The marketing materials for the Mercury Aura Pro Express claim that the drives offer up to 68 percent faster performance than the stock flash storage.
#2010 macbook air ssd upgrade upgrade#
Once the storage upgrade was installed, we found the added capacity to be a blessing, but our performance results were unexpectedly mixed. Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done with the stock flash storage once it’s removed, unless someone begins selling an external enclosure. The installation process is relatively simple (especially when compared to upgrading the iMac’s drive), and OWC provides the necessary tools. Macworld Lab received a 180GB Mercury Aura Pro Express and installed it in the 11-inch MacBook Air that came with 64GB of flash storage. OWC refers to the Mercury Aura Pro Express as SSDs, though they have a similar design as the flash storage included with the MacBook Air.)
#2010 macbook air ssd upgrade mac#
The SSDs available in older MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Pros come in a typical 2.5-inch notebook drive package. The storage device in the MacBook Air looks similar to a RAM module, but with the connectors on the short edge instead of the long edge. (Apple refers to the storage device in the mid-2010 MacBook Air as flash storage, not as a solid-state drive, or SSD. The Mercury Aura Pro Express is available in capacities ranging from 180GB for $470 to a 480GB model for $1580, which is $20 less than the price of the high-end 13-inch MacBook Air with 256GB of flash storage. If you can afford it, OWC offers storage upgrades for the mid-2010 MacBook Air models. With the ultra-thin laptop’s storage space ranging from a miniscule 64GB to an underwhelming 256GB, it’s no wonder that some MacBook Air lovers want to increase the capacity, no matter the cost. One of those tradeoffs is with the flash storage–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 standard MacBook Air configurations. But in order to offer such extreme portability, the MacBook Air comes with a few tradeoffs. Note that for all-around computing, the SSD might actually outperform the 8GB memory, since some programs have modest memory needs, but access the drive significantly.The MacBook Air has won over a large number of Apple laptop users. The SSD is also a huge improvement, but having 8GB is a better choice than the SSD for this type of work. The gray bar is the standard Apple configuration- miserably slow performance.įor this workload, 8GB memory is clearly the best first-choice performance optimization. That’s because the problem size for the diglloydMedium benchmark used here approaches 16GB. If the MacBook Pro could accept 16GB memory, times would likely drop another 50% or so.A solid state drive provides a compelling benefit for performance when memory is too low.Too little memory, e.g., 4GB, just kills performance: it’s a threshold effect.General observations apply to other Macs. Therefore, results with 4GB are also shown. But the MacBook Air is limited to 4GB (an upgrade at the time of ordering only), so a reasonable inference can be made as to the severe limitations for serious work with the ’Air. Memory prices have plummeted for the 2010 MacBook Pro, so it’s foolish to even consider a 4GB configuration for a MacBook Pro. I do not in general recommend just any solid state drive as some have issues. I used the OWC 8GB memory kit and the OWC solid state Mercury Extreme Pro and Pro RE drives for this test. As a proxy for all these tasks, the diglloydMedium benchmark was used as a reliable way to test the limits of drive speed and memory.
#2010 macbook air ssd upgrade how to#
How to get BIG performance gains by upgrading the memory and drives in your MacBook Pro.įocus here is on demanding tasks, such as Adobe Photoshop editing, Lightroom 3 and video. Send Feedback Related: hard drive, how-to, laptop, MacBook, MacBook Pro, memory, Photoshop, RAID, RAID-0, software, SSD, storage