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BARE FEATS LAB - real world Mac speed tests

Internal Flash Upgrade for
MacBook Air

Originally posted April 15th, 2016 by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist

We at BareFeats talk a lot about desktop performance and capacity upgrades but there are some important upgrades for laptops, too. For example, you have a MacBook Air with a 128G internal flash storage. You ran out of space years ago and you don't want to buy a new laptop just to get a high capacity flash storage.

ANSWER: OWC's 1TB Aura SSD internal flash upgrade.

GRAPH LEGEND
Aura 1TB Flash = 1TB Aura SSD flash storage internal upgrade
Factory 128GB = 128GB flash storage from the factory
Envoy USB3 = 128GB flash storage from factory in external Envoy USB3 bus-powered enclosure

Test Mule was a 'mid 2013' MacBook Air 11" with 1.3GHz Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of 1600MHz DDR3 memory, and Intel HD Graphics 5000 GPU. OS X El Capitan was installed on both flash storage modules.

LARGE SEQUENTIAL TRANSFER TEST
We used AJA System Test to benchmark file level sequential transfer speed using a 4GB test size.
LONGEST graph bar means the fastest overall in Megabytes per Second.

WHAT DID WE LEARN
You can breathe new life in your MacBook Air with a faster*, higher capacity flash storage module.

The installation is a snap. Fully compatible. And your old flash storage module can be re-purposed in the Envoy Pro USB3 bus-powered enclosure for archiving or supplemental storage on the MacBook Air itself or any other Mac.

(*The 256G Samsung factory flash in the 2013 MacBook Air tested as fast as the 1TB Aura but at least you are quadrupling the capacity.)

Feedback or comments? Feel free to email me,
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can follow me on
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WHERE TO BUY THE OWC AURA STORAGE UPGRADE

  • Order Aura SSD storage Upgrade for the MacBook Air direct from Other World Computing. Order with or without the Envoy Pro USB3 bus-powered enclosure.

NEW MACBOOK AIRs ON SALE!

SHOP APPLE STORE USA
Help support Bare Feats by clicking our Apple display ads or THIS Apple USA link when ordering any Apple product or Apple compatible product.

Apple sells certified refurbished Macs and iPads with one year warranty.

PowerMax not only sells new and used Macs, but will give you a generous trade-in offer on your old Mac.

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copyright 2016 Rob Art Morgan
"BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS"
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