

I have no interest in spending over $1000 on an SSD for a computer I will be replacing in a few months. Looking at the cost per gigabyte of the 3G version, the 480GB model is immediately out of the running. The 6G versions are slightly more at $259.99 for the 120GB model and $499.99 for the 240GB model. The prices on the 3G Aura Pro Express SSDs are $264.99 for the 180GB model, $399.00 for the 240GB model, and $1079.00 for the 480GB model. However, my current 2010 model will be passed on to my wife who has nearly filled her 128GB SSD on her older MacBook Air.
#OWC AURA PRO X STEP BY STEP UPGRADE#
Since I am planning to upgrade to an Ivy Bridge MacBook Air this year, the 6G Aura Pro Express would be a better option in some ways. In addition, OWC has also launched 6G Aura Pro Express SSDs to go along with the 6Gb/s SATA III interface on the 2011 MacBook Air models.Īlthough I suspect the 6G Aura Pro Express works fine in a 2010 MacBook Air even though the 2010 model has a 3Gb/s SATA II interface, OWC states on their website and when I called that the 6G version is only compatible with the 2011 MacBook Air. I have been watching the prices on the Aura Pro Express SSDs during the last year and they have steadily dropped over that time. This has led me to be mobile more often and has made the inconveniences of an external drive a true irration and hindrance. In the last several months I have started working more from unusual locations that I would not normally work from. Most of the time I was working at my desk anyway which meant using my other systems more anyway. In reality, it was not as bad as I thought it might be. This situation was always frustrating because I like simplicity and minimalism and carrying an external drive essentially kills those preferences. More photos are in my Flickr set of the installation.Īlthough I was certainly able to survive without more than 64GB of storage, it meant that things like all but one virtual machine, my mobile iTunes library, Aperture library, and larger downloads all had to live on an external USB 2.0 drive. One thing led to another and I had not upgraded the SSD for almost exactly a year.

To that end, I had purchased the 1.4GHz Core 2 Duo 11.6-inch MacBook Air with only a 64GB SSD but with the absolutely essential 4GB memory upgrade. When I originally purchased this MacBook Air, I wanted to keep things as inexpensive as possible to start out with since I was planning to upgrade to the Aura Pro Express SSD from the beginning. On Christmas day, I ordered an OWC Aura Pro Express SSD for my 2010 11-inch MacBook Air.
