Mercury Aura Pro Express SSD Offers The Fastest Speeds For MacBook Airs

MacBook Air ships with either a moderately fast SSD from Toshiba or a significantly faster drive with an updated controller from Samsung. But some people want to have even faster drives. And SSD from OWC called Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G can provide them with faster speeds.

AnandTech has reviewed this SSD and confirmed its benchmarks, which blows away any desktop or laptop SSD available on the market. AnandTech explained:

“Performance is just staggering. The comparison is borderline unfair because both the Samsung and Toshiba controllers Apple uses in its MacBook Air are really a generation old at this point, while the Mercury Aura Pro Express is the absolute latest and greatest 6Gbps solution SandForce offers”.

You can see in the table above that Mercury Aura Pro Express offers 30.4 MB/s read and 88.4 MB/s write speed, and sequential 495.1 MB/s write speed and 451.4 MB/s read speed. Sadly, this SSD include a SandForce controller which consumes more battery power, so using the SSD on the notebook increases battery drain by 5%.

OWC offers 6G SSD in both a 240GB and 120GB version, which costs $550 and $280 respectively. For more details you can read AnandTech’s review.