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.)
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WHERE TO BUY THE OWC AURA STORAGE UPGRADE
NEW MACBOOK AIRs ON SALE!
SHOP APPLE STORE USA
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Apple sells certified refurbished Macs and iPads with one year warranty.