They are not all the same – the kit from OWC uses one of the fastest hardware sets around. Even if you have the SSD-equipped Air from that generation, upgrading to this device form the Apple branded one is a revelation.

Sandforce makes the OEM chipset for several vendors, although OWC seems to be the only source for the fussy Air hardware. Worth tracking down for any Mac notebook that seems as if its getting long on the tooth…like you, I was very happy to hug my notebook again.

For me upgrading to Runcore SSD (PATA) a year ago and installing coolbook (A MUST) is absolute game changer. those 4200 drives were so sloooow.

It is so much right now for what I do that I cannot find upgrade to the new mba a big need.

With SSD even keeping 20gb mailbox does make sense as it searches through it at the speed of light (literally it shows valid emails as I type letters).

The difference between SSDs with Samsung controllers that Apple use, and the Sandforce based OWC drives are slim in the real world.

Given Sandforces poor reliability and customer service record, I’d go with an Intel drive, Crucial C300/400, or a OWC backed Sandforce drive.

An SSD even makes those old G4 Powerbooks run awesomely. Nobody believes me on this (some even deny that PATA drives exist), but you’ll be amazed…

i would only trust an intel ssd in any sort of work computer. they might be slower than the sandforce controller ssd’s, but they are much more reliable and the last thing i want happening is a crash in the middle of my development cycle.

cant for wait lion to come out with trim support.

Lion is basically paving the way for the elimination of Virtual Memory. With SSD’s being the future, Apple is building state saving into the OS. This sets up a situation like iOS has: SSD, no VM

I was an SSD skeptic until I tried the new Air. It’s an amazing difference.

I totally agree: doing an OWC upgrade (240 gig) SSD on my 2.5 ghz MacBook Pro was like getting a new computer. While doing this upgrade is not for people who feel odd about opening up their computer, it’s not all that tough.

Link

The only issue I have is with deep sleep. My computer will not sleep if left open: engergy saver will turn the screen off but not the “hard disk” which means that touching the track pad will wake it up. This is not true when deep sleep is working correctly: only hitting a key on teh keyboard will wake up the machine.

Given that there’s no hard disk in the machine this is less of an issue but it is an issue if one is working off of battery power on a plane and dozes off, lid up.

I was told by OWC that this is addresses in a Sandforce firmware update which needs Windows to install. I asked them if I could send the SSD back for them to do it and they said no. This is the only bug in the ointment for me in doing this upgrade.

I’ve recently ordered a new MacBook Pro (had to as my wife needs a new computer and in our house we trickle down) and ordered it with an Apple SSD which I’m hoping will solve the sleep problem. I’m not too happy about reading here that others have found the Apple supplied SSD lacking compared with the OWC… Time will tell as I’ll have the two side by side next week.

Thanks for the update Khoi, do let us know if your computer sleeps correctly.

My Macs have had a tendency to slow down over time as well. I often fill the drive then free up space when performance is degraded. So once a year or so, I clone the internal drive, reformat, then clone back. This revitalizes my machines’ performance.

Fragmentation on the Mac is controversial, but I anecdotally think it works for me.

I was having dinner with a friend last night who’s a computer scientist, and his brother develops the latest and greatest Intel SSDs. His brother won’t give him anything specific, but what’s coming in the near future is supposed to be mind-boggling.

What OCZ just introduced with their Vertex 3 drives is only going to benefit the latest MacBook Pros that support SATA 3 that goes 6 Gbps (and Mac Pros with the right SATA card). Even without that latest stuff, my Mac Pro with the OCZ Vertex 2 240 gig drive is a screamer. Boot times are more than 3 times faster than before. I’m tempted to get a second 240 gig drive and turn it into a RAID 0 boot drive. 😀

One thing I find important to do is to move the user accounts to a separate drive. That way you can still use your user folders without being restricted by the size of your boot drive.

I did the same thing to my MacPro last August. I put in 4 SSD drives into a single stripped RAID array.

The speed increase was fantastic… and well worth the price for me!

I’m awaiting delivery of the 360GB OWC SSD for my 11″ MBA. Can anyone suggest good speed tests i could run before and after the swap, to gather some empirical data on the improvements with the new drive?

(and btw, i know the cost of the 360GB is extreme. But I figure that with the cost of the 11″ MBA and the 360GB SSD, I’ll have invested about as much as i spent on a Titanium Powerbook years ago. My upgraded MBA will be much closer to my ultimate laptop than the Titanium PB was).

@weiran
I don’t have experience with the Rev A Airs that had PATA controllers that really were quite slow and may have been a bottleneck for any SSD, regardless of upgrades.

But the B and C revisions had decent SATA controllers. Given that the stock Samsung SSDs had a claimed max speed of about 90MB/s read, 70 write, I wan’t surprised to see the Sandforce based drives really make a difference – they are in the neighborhood of three times faster. Enough to notice in day to day use – enough to dissolve my frustrations with the device.

The other options you mention do not deal with the lack of TRIM support under SL as well as the SF, but are excellent choices, too, although I have not seen them in a form factor that can fit the prev gen Airs. I’d be curious to hear the reliability concerns – not something that I had come across when researching.

I did the same with my MCP i7 also with OWC Mercury Extreme but I’m having auto-sleep issues. I had to disable that feature altogether. It is not a show stopper but the promised FirmWare update is taking very long…

How do you set up your drives? I’ve been considering replacing the DVD drive in my MBP with an SSD, but then what? Do you just put the OS and apps on there, and leave your user folder on the spinny? How do you work with Time Machine (or other backups) with this setup?

@David I did the DVD drive removal surgery. It was fairly straightforward as long as you’re comfortable cracking the case open and don’t care about the warranty. A 256GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD went in there and a 1TB WD in the regular disk slot.

The system boots off the SSD (blazingly fast) but I keep user accounts and a bootable system on HD. You can use something like Superduper to backup the SSD to the HD on a regular schedule.

I also keep all my apps on the HD, except for the most frequently used ones (like Adobe CS and Xcode). This way the SSD doesn’t get too full, although each time an app does an auto-update it insists on installing the update to the boot volume, so over time more apps are migrating to the SSD.

Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I wouldn’t trust my pictures, music, email, and work files to the SSD. Overall, though, it’s been fabulous. I don’t want to give this setup up, even though the new MBP speed numbers are way up there. Would hate to have to go back to a one HD or SSD system.

I literally just made the plunge 2 weeks ago and installed a 256GB SSD in my late ’08 24″ aluminum iMac, along with doubling the 2 gigs of memory to the 4 gig maximum. like the article says, it’s really like getting a brand new computer – and in some ways, better. I don’t do any video or photo work so my hard drive was unquestionably the tightest bottle neck in the system, and that fact only becomes more apparent the first time you boot up your newly SSD equipped system.

I didn’t comment here to brag though, I want to point out a few things that no one pointed out to me for anyone who happens to Google: 24″ iMac SSD upgrade and stumbles across this comment. First of all, you’re going to need a 2.5-3.5″ hard drive conversion kit, and if you have the newish 21.5″ or 27″ iMac, make sure you look into solutions for the temperature sensor (for those models they went away from a sensor that simply sticks on to the drive, to a superior cable that plugs into the drives built in sensor. And to complicate things even more, each brand of HD has it’s own custom cable, so the chances anything will work with your SSD are pretty slim. The best solution I’ve seen is spending a few bucks on the older “stick-on” style sensor and using that instead). As far as the conversion kit goes, the particular model the guide I followed recommended, forces you to screw in the hard drive jerry-rigged style (because the SATA/power cables are only long enough to plug into a 3.5″ drive) so I chose one that duplicates the exact dimensions of a 3.5″ drive and you simply plug/slide in your 2.5″ drive and it fits perfectly. I saw a few on newegg that worked like this and I’m sure any of them would work. Even if you’re fairly competent/comfortable with working inside/taking apart computers, the hard drive removal for an iMac might seem a little bit daunting with it’s suction cups and all, but it really is quite simple. They fit together tightly, but Apple made them pretty simple to take apart with the right tools and some patience. I didn’t want to take any chances, so I bought the tools iFixit recommended and followed one of their guides that gave step-by-step instructions, and the whole process was very simple – in fact it was such a nice break from the norm (I do PC repair for a living) that it was even kind of fun. Do your research, use the correct tools, watch a couple videos on YouTube for practice, print out a iFixit’s step-by-step guide, and I promise you can’t screw it up. If you have a 3-4 year old Mac you’re considering replacing, replace the HD with a SSD and max out your memory (you’d be surprised how inexpensive memory is right now) instead, and you’ll actually have a faster machine in the end.

Now it’s just up to Apple to FINALLY implement native TRIM support so that addicting SSD performance doesn’t degrade after a few months. The last I heard they were adding it to Lion, but apparently the latest build of 10.6 shipping with the new MacBook Pro’s with Apple-included SSD’s already have it. I’d LOVE to update my computer sometime in the next couple weeks and see that they added it. If you don’t know what TRIM is do some research into it (I’d explain it if this post wasn’t already too long), but don’t let it scare you away from an SSD, apparently the performance degradation isn’t nearly as bad with OS X.

@rf: “These SSDs, though lovely and fast, are much more likely to suffer catastrophic failure.”

I don’t think this is true, at least not in my experience and I’ve been using an OWC 240 gig SSD for quite a while now. I back up daily with Superduper as I did pre-SSD (much faster now) but I’ve had absolutely no problems and my machine seems as fast now as it did the day I did the upgrade. As I said above, my only issue on a 3 year old MBP is sleep: the screen sleeps, the motherboard/HD/SSD/Fan doesn’t if the lid/screen is left up. Put the screen down or choose sleep from a menu and everything works as it should.

I have 5 friends who have done similar upgrades, 3 with OWC, 2 with Crucial and none have experienced “catastrophic” or any other kind of failure.

No doubt some will experience problems but this is true in the hard disk world as well.

@Chris – After reading into some detailed explanations regarding how SSD drives work, I really can’t see how anybody wouldn’t recommend TRIM support in the OS. Not that I think it will ALWAYS be necessary, I think someday soon the drives themselves will perform the same function internally, (and yes I know that’s what garbage collection is, but it’s widely agreed that garbage collection isn’t as efficient as TRIM) but as long as SSD’s slow down so dramatically when data is written on top of existing data, there needs to be something that automatically wipes the cells marked as “erasable” in the background. The only other solution I see beyond the drives doing this automatically, is creating cells that can be re-written to as fast as they can as if they’re “virgin”.

@Chris – Maybe that’s why Apple’s putting TRIM support into OS/X Lion!