AnandTech is reporting that Apple has appeared to have made some changes to the MacBook Air released in October 2010. The Macbook Air refresh last fall included some welcome surprises for Apple fans — a new 11.6″ form factor, an external case redesign, faster graphics, and larger SSD drives. All of this came at a lower price. The most interesting part of the refresh was the new SSD drives. Apple didn’t use regular 2.5″ or 1.8″ SSDs and instead introduced a whole new type of SSD form factor called mSATA SSDs a.k.a. blade SSDs.
The MacBook Air (Late 2010) teardown by iFixit confirmed that the MacBook Airs shipped last Fall contained a Toshiba Blade x-gale SSD. However, according to AnandTech, there appear to be two different versions of SSDs in currently shipping MacBook Airs. The first one to ship was the Toshiba, but now there is proof that a completely different SSD is shipping. The model number on the new SSD drive is SM128C and the Toshiba is TS128C. The SM and TS in the model names stand for Samsung and Toshiba respectively.
So what’s the big deal? Well the big deal is that the SM128C models apparently offer a very good performance bump when compared to the TS128C. The SM128C performs at up to 260MB/s read and 210MB/s write speeds while the TS128C performs at up to 210MB/s read and 185MB/s write speeds. The SM128C supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and the TS128C doesn’t. Here are AnandTech’s speed comparison test results:
AnandTech goes on to say that they are not completely sure that Samsung manufactures the SM128C, but signs point to the fact that they probably do. I agree with them when they said, “Ultimately it may not matter, as users will get whatever Apple decides to put in their laptops. ” I like extra speed just like anyone else, but my 13-inch MacBook Air has been the best Macbook I’ve ever owned and I’ve owned practically all of them except for the 17-inch and the low-end MacBooks. Therefore any improvements Apple makes are welcome.
