New SSD for MacBook Air

Apple’s history with SSDs

Apple was in big trouble last year, when the demand for their Mac devices was at its peak. The MacBooks sold millions of units last year, but the year wasn’t completely trouble-free for Apple. The unexpected chaos caused by the flood in Thailand last year also had some disastrous consequences in the computer hardware sector. It is the manufacturers in Thailand that provide hard disk drives for Apple which comes in the Apple devices. But with the flooding, Apple found it hard to include hard disk drives in their MacBooks.

Apple had to go for an alternative for hard disk drives and used the Solid state drives (SSD) instead. The solid state drives are more powerful and faster making your computer faster even during boot ups. Eventually Apple got back on its feet and things just became normal. But many people now believe that MacBooks should feature SSD drives with greater capacities. If you use the SSD drive in your MacBooks for storage, you will notice that it is pretty fast in read/write operations.

New SSD for MacBook Airs

MacBook Airs now come with Solid state drives but of low capacities. The present Solid state drives in MacBook Airs also don’t reach top read/write speeds, and would go only till half their top speeds. But there are better Solid state drives. The SSD manufactured by Other World Computing (OWC) sports a SandForce memory controller which enables the drive to function at its maximum speed, reaching to up to 500 MB per second.

OWC now released a bigger model of SSDs with a capacity twice as that of the present SSD capacity. If you are wondering if the SSD drives will lose their speeds proportionately with an increase in their capacities, you are wrong. The 480 GB OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express SSD coming in the new MacBook Airs deliver the peak speed of an SSD even at this large a size. Data block management techniques and advanced free space management “recycling” techniques in the OWC Mercury Aura Pro SSDs mean more optimization isn’t necessary in the OWC SSDs.

The Mercury Aura Pro SSDs will be at full potential through out their lifespan. Data protection in this SSD is 100 times more than that provided by the greatest of the HDDs. Aura Pro OWC 480 GB SSDs are compatible with both MacBook Air sizes, with 3 year warranty. However, this cool hardware does come at a big price…….literally. It costs about $1,100 approximately. If it sounds a bit expensive, you will have a second opinion when you see for yourself, how fast the Mercury Aura Pro 480 GB SSD is in your MacBook Air.

Apple MacBook Air SSD Gets Faster

Last year, the Thailand floods affected Apple’s business due to the global shortage of hard disks. Solid state hard drives replaced ordinary hard drives, but at a slow rate. Using solid state drives would make the host computers so much faster that the system will even boot up in a jiffy.

It was Apple which actually made SSDs famous, by including them in the Mac systems, technically. More people came to know about it and the demand for SSD increased, hence increasing Apple Mac devices with SSDs’ demand proportionately. However SSD’s doesn’t usually come in great sizes. The memory capacity will be comparatively small, but the computer will be very much fast, in accessing and running applications to booting up.

Reportedly, Solid state drives are nothing like it has ever been thanks to the efforts from companies like Samsung and Toshiba.  At the CES 2012, Samsung’s and Toshiba’s booths showcased their respective versions of the SSD storage solutions. It is Samsung and Toshiba that provide SSDs for Apple’s MacBook Airs. The new 470 OEM SSD from Samsung seems to have caught Apple’s attention and reportedly, news came out pretty soon that Apple is planning to buy Samsung’s new SSDs on a large scale.

Apple SSD SM128C

Toshiba’s new SSDs are comparatively slower than Samsung’s new OEM SSDs. That isn’t the surprise here. According to Samsung’s reports, 470 OEM SSDs got completely sold out late last year itself, which made Samsung take a shot in developing a new 830 Series SSD. The Write speed of 830 2.5 inch model SSD was over 400 MB per second while the read speed was over 500 MB per second.

If you search the speed of the current SSD models in Apple MacBook Airs and compare it with the Samsung OEM 830 models, you will be very surprised and absolutely impressed, because the read and write rates of 830 series SSDs are almost twice more than those of the current SSD model in MacBook Airs. In addition to this, even Toshiba’s new SSD will bite the dust if it goes head-to-head against Samsung’s 830 SSDs.

Samsung also confirmed that its biggest customer is still Apple, which buys 830 Series SSDs. So technically, it is safe to assume that enhanced MacBook Airs will soon be out with 830 SSDs in them, making them twice as fast. However, we also have to consider a possibility that Apple won’t always be relying on Samsung SSD drives for too long. It might go for the easily available Toshiba SSDs, which is developing at a slow rate or continue with Samsung for a risky yet effective team up.