Upgrade And Benchmark Your 2012 MacBook Air's SSD

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not a huge fan of the sandforce / vertex drives.. I had a vertex2 and had 2 of them die within a month because of my computer going to sleep... they sent me an agility 3 to replace the last one, now I'm scared to let my PC sleep,, I would be extra worried in a MBA as you would want it to go to sleep often... IMO would be better just to order a MBA with the amount of storage required or spend 150 bux on a nice large external drive and be done with it.
 
This is why I'm no longer an Apple fan. You pay 3x the price of, say a Lenovo, for a computer that has a shelf life of maybe two years tops, and is incredibly difficult to upgrade on top of that. Not to mention Apple makes it near impossible to find spare parts.
 


Hmm... The 13" MBA is $1,199.00... Could you kindly point me to the URL for the $399.66 Lenovo Ultrabook? I would love to buy one 😀
 
ultrabook is an intel trade mark and just a marketing thing, a laptop is a laptop. there are plenty of equivalent 120gb ssd equipped laptops out there for around $600. personally, i got a hp m6 with an a10-4600m, gets 6 hours battery and blows intel away at on chip gaming, threw an extra 120gb ssd i had laying around, put the 750gb hd into my ps3, and i paid $399 on a deal for mine, and its less than an 1" thick

there are also plenty of youtube drop tests that show having a plastic 399 vs aluminum frame mac 999 have NO, none whatsoever advantagaes. only advantage is they are about 15-40% lighter and about 20-35% lighter. If your like me, i dont drop my laptops and im not a wussy even though im much more scrawny than your average human.
 
So what are the rules for posting here? Every time I try, I get "An error has occured." except above which was a test. Are we being censored now or is this still a forum for the free exchange of thought?
 


Yup same here - three chips in a row, two died after about four days exhibiting the same behavior and one died about two months into it with different behavior. Getting a RMA refund now but its been painful swapping in/out chips that are obviously sub standard.

 
So I suppose the solution is to not buy an OWC SSD unless you have a lot of patience and like to reinstall Lion over and over and hopefully have a good backup on hand. I went through three of these chips (the 450 being about $700) until finally I got them to do an RMA on the last failed chip which they did but then charged my card until I sent back the failed chip... so moral of the story there is to keep your factory 250 and keep a bootable OS on it so you can actually use your system while you wait for a replacement. I went through three chips and no I'm not a retiree or bored student with lots of cash to spare, but someone who has spent over 20 years replacing chips in various systems (some worth over a million per shot) and very familiar with opening something up and anti-static procedures - but the first and last chip lasted about four days, then the system froze, cpu fan on high and would not boot back up even with pram reset (chip showed as a 64kb non OWC branded chip, so assuming it was a chip on the SSD that the SSD reported back to the OS when the main chip burned out) - the second chip from OWC lasted slightly longer (about two months) and then burned out but not as violently as the others (but then possibly mdworker was not grinding away for spotlight when the chip died) - with that one the OS froze a couple times, I ran a backup (holding my breath and thank god I did that) then rebooted and yup... no longer recognized. Honestly if you look at the OWC chip its components show no recognizable maker and the board seems cheap compared to the stock Apple SSD which is "samsung" all over the main memory chips and the board and chips feel heavier (and look like they are made from better materials) - this kind of thing, laugh or not, does make a difference. I don't know where OWC gets their chips made but I have a feeling its as low budget as you can get. Final moral of the story is that buying the Mac Air with the 500GB SSD is a heck of a lot cheaper in the end than trying to DIY the thing with cheap OWC parts (unless you have a lot of time on your hands and an extra $700 to tie up for a few months - which you may, but I don't)

HTH - Jon
 
My experience with OWC products coupled with the experience of others out there leads me to the following conclusion:

OWC is definitely a name I equate with lack of quality.

It wasn't with just one SSD. Every one of these things failed for us within months. OWC=junk in my book.
 
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