Not that it’s a bad thing, SSD manufacturers have nearly blown through the bandwidth available to them from the 6 Gb/s interface. The speeds OWC quotes for the Express 6G, while great, taken in the vacuum of SSD speeds that we see with every new SSD announcement, don’t seem to really stand out. They also ship the drives with the two required screw drivers to make the swap, and if that seems daunting, they also have a video and other support documents to make it as easy as possible. Of course it’s not, OWC engineered this drive to match the gum-stick size and proprietary Apple interface to make it a direct replacement for the stock drive. OWC quotes performance specs that are very SandForce-like, read speeds of up to 507 MB/s and writes of 454 MB/s.īy just looking at the specs, it would be easy to assume the Aura Pro Express 6G is another standard SSD meant for deployment in any machine. The Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G comes in 120GB and 240GB capacities, our review unit is 240GB, and leverages a SandForce SF-2281 processor and the aforementioned SATA 6Gb/s interface. The Story this time around has a lot of the same factors at play, OWC has created the only third party SSD alternative for the July 2011 MacBook Air. In that review we saw speed increases of 40-70% over the stock Toshiba SSD that came with the notebook.

In March we reviewed OWC’s MacBook Air SSD replacement for the late 2010 MacBook Air that offered a SATA 3Gb/s interface. If you’re a frequent reader, this scenario might sound familiar.

Thanks to OWC though, MacBook Air owners can finally unlock the full performance capabilities of their MacBook Air with the Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G SSD.

But even the lucky ones are getting an SSD that doesn’t even come close to leveraging the speed potential of the SATA 6Gb/s interface. If you’re unlucky, you get stuck with a Toshiba SSD the lucky ones get a Samsung drive. If there’s much to complain about with the July 2011 MacBook Air though, it’s that Apple continues to offer two SSDs that vary widely in performance. There’s little argument that the Apple MacBook Air is a fantastic computer my bias after using both since the 2010 refresh notwithstanding. If there’s much to complain about with the July 2011 MacBook Air though, it’s that Apple continues to offer two SSDs that vary widely in performance.

Owc aura pro 6g