14 DAY TRIAL // When Apple released the second generation of its MacBook Air, one of the most important improvements that the company has brought to its ultra-portable was the addition of an SSD unit, and it now seems like a new revision of the MBA has hit the stores which packs an even faster solid state disk.
Unlike most other laptop computers, the MacBook Air doesn't use a regular 2.5-inch of 1.8-inch SSD, and relies instead on mSATA drives. These are built by Toshiba and are identified by the product number TS128C.
But these don't appear to be the only SSDs that are found inside the MBA, as recently, more and more of Apple's ultra-portable have been found to pack drives that are identified by the operating system as SM128C.
While nothing is certain at this point, the model name seems to suggest that the solid state disks are built by Samsung, a company that has provided Apple with SSD drives in the past.
The most interesting fact, however, is that these drives are somewhat faster than their Toshiba counterparts.
The difference isn't staggering, but the benchmark results gathered by AnandTech show that the SM128C manages up to 260MB/s read and 210MB/s write speeds.
In comparison, the Toshiba Blade X-gale SSDs used in the first revision of the second-gen MacBook Air only managed to achieve speeds of up to 210MB/s read and 185MB/s write.
Furthermore, the SM128C also supports the Native Command Queuing (NCQ) technology, which could increase the performance of the drives in workloads where multiple simultaneous read/write requests are issued at the same time.
According to the same source, the performance of the drives seem to match the figures slated by Samsung for its 470 series SSDs which can provide speeds of up to 250MB/s read and 220MB/s write.