14 DAY TRIAL // OWC has just announced the official release of the Mercury Aura Pro series of solid state disks which come as an upgrade path for Apple MacBook Air owners. The SSDs are available in capacities ranging all the way up to 480GB and offer a significant speed increase compared to the stock drives.
The SSDs were for the first time announced at the beginning of the year, during the CES 2011 fair, and are compatible with all 11.1-inch and 13.3-inch 2010 MacBook Air models.
OWC promises that its Mercury Aura Pro SSDs offers up to 68% better performance than the factory available options.
In order to deliver this significant performance increase, the solid state drives are based on a SandForce 1200-series controller that is paired together with fast Micron NAND Flash.
According to OWC, this configuration enables the drive to reach peak data rates of 275MB/s.
These numbers seem to be confirmed by a recent Ars Technica review, that found the Mercury Aura Pro is capable of reaching read speeds of 264MB/s in some test scenarios.
Sequential writes also showed a strong performance as the SSD surpassed the 200MB/s barrier, reaching a maximum of 218.3MB/s.
The OWC Mercury Aura Pro is available with storage capacities ranging from 180GB to 480GB, and prices start at $479.99 and go all the way up to $1579.99.
When Apple launched the 2010 MacBook Pro the ultra-portable, this was equipped with Toshiba Blade X-gale SSDs with a maximum capacity of 256GB. The drives achieved speeds of up to 210MB/s read and 185MB/s write.
Recently however, Apple started to quietly update the Toshiba drives with faster SSDs that are identified by the part number SM128C and offer support for Native Command Queuing (NCQ) as well as read and write speeds of 260MB/s and 210MB/s, respectively.