New MacBook Air SSDs are replaceable

No sooner had the new MacBook Air models shown up in Apple Stores than the iFixit team grabbed one for dissection. The site always does a teardown of the latest in Apple technology for the benefit of repair technicians and for hobbyists who love to see what's inside their Macs. The 2011 13" MacBook Air teardown shows how Apple engineers cram so much power in such a tiny computer.

One of the nicer things to come out of the teardown was the news that the internal solid-state drive isn't soldered to the logic board, meaning that MBA owners who would like more storage and don't have an issue with invalidating their warranty can open the computer and install a drive with more capacity. While Apple's MacBook Air storage solutions max out at 256 GB, OWC has faster SSDs with capacities up to 480 GB.

With more powerful processors (up to a 1.8 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7 CPU) and the ability to bump up the SSD capacity, it's a pity that none of the MacBook Air models are able to take more than 4 GB of RAM. It's soldered onto the logic board, which is why iFixit notes that "it might be worth it to buy the nicer model (4 GB) from the get-go."

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Source: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook-Air-13-Inch-Mid-2011-…

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The 2011 13" MacBook Air teardown showed just how Apple engineers crammed so much power into so tiny a computer

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dallasward007

Even beyond putting more storage into the thing, it's good that it's replaceable in case something goes wrong. Even SSDs can get damaged or corrupted. It would be poor design (at least for the customer) to have to scrap a thousand dollar laptop when a single component goes wrong.

July 22 2011 at 8:51 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Roman Tarnavski

Are there any performance tests of 'disk-only' within the new 2011 MBA's? Wonder how their compare with OCZ Vertex 2.5" series

July 22 2011 at 1:05 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Hi Fung can you boot Snow Leopard off the USB stick that came with your old Macbook Air 11 and try install a fresh copy on the 180GB drive?

July 22 2011 at 12:32 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to RG's comment

FungFlex

RG, I couldn't get the 11 to boot off of a Snow Leopard disk at all, but I have a Lion thumb that should be 100% compatible at it isn't.

July 22 2011 at 9:32 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

FungFlex

This is 100% not true. Just tested the 180gb Mercury Aura Express Pro on the 11.6" 2011 Macbook Air. The system does not recognize the drive at all.

Pics: http://fungblog.com/post/7908198046/macbook-air-11-6-2011-ssd

July 21 2011 at 9:24 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to FungFlex's comment

OWC

Will have to respectfully disagree with that statement. We tested compatibility in both the 11-inch and the 13-inch models as soon as we got them in yesterday afternoon; both worked like a charm with the Aura Pro Express. In fact, we did a benchmark comparison between the two drives in the 11-inch model - you can see the results at our blog. .

Being unable to boot to Snow Leopard is understandable - Macs generally are unable to boot to an OS previous to the one they ship with. The Lion thumb drive, however, is another story. Unless it's the official one from Apple, it's hard to comment; there's no "official" solution for creating your own bootable thumb drive, so we really can't comment.

Have you tried using the Lion Internet Recovery method outlined in Apple KB Article #HT4718 ? This seems to be Apple's preferred method when installing a new drive on a machine that came with Lion pre-installed, and is how we did it for our testing.

You can also try the following, though success may be hit-or-miss:
1.) Boot to the recovery partition on the stock drive.
2.) Use Disk Utility to do a restore to an external USB drive.
3.) Replace the stock drive with the Aura Pro Express
4.) Boot to the USB drive's recovery partition
5.) Use Disk Utility to do a restore to the Aura Pro Express
6.) Boot to the Aura Pro Express

If you're having further problems, you may want to contact our Technical Support staff - 1-800-275-4576