Going from MBP to an MBA (external SSD questions)

Read the reviews on Newegg. Anything above 4 stars with 100+ reviews is a good one.

I wouldn't worry about it too much - you're going to be limited by the USB 2.0 port which is only capable of 40MB/s.

robvas said:

I wouldn't worry about it too much - you're going to be limited by the USB 2.0 port which is only capable of 40MB/s.

Click to expand...

This is definitely worth thinking about. You're going to be paying a significant premium for an SSD, while the performance difference between an external SSD vs platter drive is going to be minimal.

What kind of enclosure/connector are you going to be using to connect the external drive?

Do you need a mobile storage solution or is this just for at home? I find banging redundant files and all my iTunes library on a NAS gives my air plenty of free space.

The only connection on a Macbook Air that is even possibly capable of accepting the full bandwidth of an external SSD would be thunderbolt, and I don't know of any thunderbolt SSDs. Even then you'd have to test it, but the potential for bandwidth would be there. SSDs do break just like mechanical drives. The lack of moving parts isn't a complete and automatic fix for hard drive reliability issues.

If you're popping a drive into an enclosure, you should do your homework on enclosures. I've seen some decent ones, and some very bad ones. I've got a fanless icydock firewire enclosure (it runs surprisingly cool) that's worked okay for a very long time, but many people have complained about dead power supplies on them. Then I've seen others with noisy fans that still ran hotter. A good design goes quite a long way on these.

mcash1 said:

Totally huge thanks for the replies. I'm going to get a 1tb drive for now and see where the ssd market goes. Obviously a thunderbolt ssd solution will be what I'll want when it's ready to sell.

Thx!

Click to expand...

I believe this is what you are looking for:

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10549

cheers