OWC 480 GB SSD Hard Drive for Macbook Air

I’m completely obsessed with my Macbook Air 11″. It is a thing of beauty – a machine to kick every other laptop’s ass – by a longshot. I remember hauling my first laptop – a Dell, and how big and bulky that thing was. I feel in love with my Macbook Air 11″ during my nomadic years and wouldn’t trade it for any other laptop. It’s the baddest ass combination of ULTRA-portability, power, lightness, and beauty. One of its greatest features is its SSD drive. I can close the lid (it goes to sleep in 1 second), throw it into my bag (which is already super light), and run off to the coffee shop to get juiced up on espresso. I open it back up and it fires up in record time.

Mac Mini Suckage

A week ago I decided to get a “home computer” (now that I have a home base). I got a 27″ LED monitor and connected it to a brand new Mac Mini. I used it for a few days but something seemed off. It was slow. I couldn’t understand it – I mean, hey, it’s a brand new Mac! what gives? It took me a little while to realize this, but after going between the Macbook Air and the mini – it dawned on me:

This thing has a slow ass HDD. The Mac Mini has a 5400 rpm “spinning on a disk like an old man cranking a record player” hard drive

I never would have imagined that hard drive speed could make such a big difference. So I started looking into it a bit more. And then I decided to take the Mac Mini back to Best Buy and use my Macbook Air as my home and on-the-go machine (plus this meshed well with my minimalism philosophy). I kept the 27″ Samsung LED to connect to the Mini for when I’m at home (which is awesome, btw). I was pleased with my choice, but I was still curious. If the drive made such a remarkable difference, what else was possible?

Enter the OWC 6G (*Cue Angel Music)

After researching the differences between SSD and HDD hard drives, I came upon the holy grail of Macbook Air mods – a 480 GB solid state drive made by OWC for the Macbook Air. I promptly ordered it. Santa The UPS man delivered my 480 GB Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G SSD yesterday afternoon and after dinner and a few IPA’s I sat at my table and performed some Macbook Air surgery.

it’s Aliiiiiiive!

Afterwards I used Disk Utility to partition the drive, & installed OS X via Lion Internet Restore on the new OWC SSD. It took about an hour or so (Ashley and I watched some Arrested Development while my little Frankenstein monster was getting Lion’d up).

So Do I Love it?

Let’s just say it’s something like this…

a dramatization of what happened next

I f**king love this thing! Holy shnikeys! I never in a million years thought that it would make such a huge difference. I always thought it was about processor speed and RAM – but damn, having an SSD drive, especially such a fast one – makes a HUGE difference. It takes Photoshop CS6 something like 2 seconds to fire up. Shutdown and startup speeds are blazing fast. Even surfing the internet (and definitely opening up Chrome, Firefox) is much, much faster now. Reportedly there’s a small hit in battery life, but having this fast of a drive way more than makes up for it to me. This is pretty much how I feel…

If you have an extra grand to drop and want the smallest, fastest, lightest, and most badassest laptop in the world, stick a OWC SSD drive in your 11″ Macbook Air. happy squealing child photo courtesy of: adwriter via photopin cc