Combined, these features offer data protection that is purported to be orders of magnitude better than even enterprise-class spinning platters. OWC representatives told Ars that the SandForce controllers, besides offering some of the fastest read and write speeds, also include error correction code, built-in free space management with 7 percent over-provisioning, and built-in block management and wear leveling. When a review unit is available, we'll do some comparison testing with a stock 11' MacBook Air. While the Toshiba-made Apple drives are rated at 215MB/s ( our own testing showed performance that was slower but still speedy), OWC's SandForce-based drives are rated up to 275MB/s, for a 22 percent performance boost. The Aura Pro Express comes in 180GB, 240GB, and 360GB capacities for as much as three times the capacity. For the 11' MacBook Air, Apple offers 64GB or 128GB options, and for the 13' MacBook Air it offers 128GB or 256GB options. Dubbed the Mercury Aura Pro Express, these SSDs offer faster performance and much higher capacities than Apple offers in stock form. The sample Aura Pro Express at CES is built with Micron flash and the latest SandForce controller.įinally, OWC is releasing a drop-in replacement for the special, small-outline SSDs used in the latest 2010 MacBook Air models that Apple shipped late last year. Additionally, the 480GB option offers four times the capacity of the original SSD options from Apple. Available in 60GB, 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities, they offer massive performance improvement over the 4200 RPM hard drives that shipped in low-end MBA configurations, and at least 20 percent performance improvement over factory SSDs.

The Mercury Aura Pro MBA is a 1.8' SSD replacement for the first two generations of MacBook Air. Both the desktop and laptop versions offer up to 41x faster performance than the factory hard drives, most of which spin at 5400 RPM. These 2.5' drives have a built-in IDE interface and are a drop-in replacement for current IDE hard drives. The Mercury Legacy Pro drives offer 40GB, 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB SSD drive options for pre-Intel Powerbooks. The drives are available in 40GB, 60GB, 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities, and are shipping now. The Mercury Extreme Pro Legacy drives use an SATA to IDE bridge, along with a 3.5' adapter, to bring SSD performance to legacy desktop Macs. OWC is launching four new lines of solid state drives using the respected SandForce controllers. In addition to SATA and even IDE-based drives for boosting performance of older Macs, the company is producing a line of fast, SandForce-based SSD drives for the newest MacBook Air models.

Other World Computing, known for their Mac upgrades and hard drive enclosures, has announced at CES a full line of SSD drive upgrades for desktop and mobile Macs.

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