Love the new MacBook Air that you just brought home from the Apple Store but annoyed that the stock SSD doesn’t run as fast as the hardware can support? OWC has some news for you. They’ve announced the release of the 6G Mercury Aura Pro Express, a replacement SSD for the 2011 MacBook Air that fully utilizes the 6GB/s SATA interface added in this iteration. Two capacities are available, 120GB and 240GB, which are comparable in size to the stock 128GB and 256GB available from Apple.
Love the new MacBook Air that you just brought home from the Apple Store but annoyed that the stock SSD doesn’t run as fast as the hardware can support? OWC has some news for you. They’ve announced the release of the 6G Mercury Aura Pro Express, a replacement SSD for the 2011 MacBook Air that fully utilizes the 6GB/s SATA interface added in this iteration. Two capacities are available, 120GB and 240GB, which are comparable in size to the stock 128GB and 256GB available from Apple.
The difference comes in the fact that the stock SSDs utilize SATA 2.0 and are limited to 3GB/s. OWC claims that write speeds are 3.1x faster and read speeds are 2.7x faster than the stock SSDs. That translates into claimed speeds of 500 MB/s reading and 450 MB/s writing. The SSDs utilize Toggle Synchronous NAND and are built on SandForce 2200 controllers. The speed boost seems likely given the huge gains we saw in the prior generation MacBook Air and the first Mercury Aura Pro Express SSD.
The drives retail for $349.99 for the 120GB model and $599.99 for the 240 GB model. Both carry a 3-year warranty and are available through the OWC web site and other retailers.
Update – OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G Review Posted
