Apple MacBook Air 1.4GHz (11.6-inch Core 2 Duo) - Late 2010
My factory installed 60GB SSD was maxed out with essential apps and data. Fortunately an Engadget RSS feed about OWC at MacWorld pointed me towards the Mercury Auro Pro range that they were advertising at the event. All credit to OWC for actually having the product available now, rather than teasing us with future products at MacWorld! From the sizes available - 180GB, 240GB and 480GB, I chose the 240GB as the best compromise on size/price. I ordered it Sunday and it arrived in the UK on Tuesday morning via FedEx.
I cloned my factory SSD with Carbon Copy Cloner to an external USB drive before starting the upgrade. I watched the installation video on the OWC site first, which showed how simple the upgrade would be. OWC had provided both types of screwdriver needed to open the MacBook Air case and to remove the single screw holding the SSD board in place - both tools were good quality and saved me having to buy new bits for my screwdriver. Replacing the old SSD with the new OWC unit was a breeze.
With the case back on, I booted from my cloned copy on the USB drive, ran Disk Utility to initialise the OWC SSD, ran Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the USB drive clone back to the OWC SSD, shutdown the laptop and removed the USB. When I powered up the laptop again - voila! MacBook Air running Lion on OWC 240GB SSD! Happy camper!
The OWC SSD performs with the speed that I've now come to expect from SSDs. Unfortunately, I forgot to run a "before" speed test with the factory SSD, but I'm seeing consistent 94MB/s write, 212Mb/s read from the Disk Speed Test app from the AppStore using the 5GB test. I'm very happy with the performance.
On the same order, I also bought an OWC Elite Mini USB 3/eS6G external caddy so that I could still make use of the factory SSD. That works a treat and was really simple to install too. I recommend buying one of these if you are upgrading an old SSD like I did.
