“The 2011 MacBook Air comes with an unadvertised feature: support for the SATA 6 Gb/s interface — which has twice the bandwidth of the 3 Gb/s SATA bus in the 2010 MacBook Air,” Jason D. O’Grady reports for ZDNet. “This means that the 2011 MBA is capable of pushing data rates to over 500MB/s — if you have the right SSD, that is. Apple basically hobbles the MacBook Air by shipping it with a SATA 3 Gb/s SSD.”
“OWC’s 6G Mercury Aura Pro Express [US$1,129] uses a screaming SandForce SF-2281 controller and Toshiba Toggle NAND and when combined with the 2011 MBA’s SATA 6 Gb/s interface pushes 511 MB/s read speeds and 448 MB/s write speeds according to OWC’s benchmarks,” O’Grady reports. “All I can say is that the thing is fast… The 6G Merc from OWC fully leverages the 6G SSD bus and cranks data rates to over 500MB/s – which is scorching fast.”
Read more in the full article, including benchmark porn, here.