I have a maxed out 13-in mid-2011 MBA that I bought with a 256GB SSD, at the time the largest capacity available. I keep a lot of my archive files on an iMac with a 3TB Fusion disk, but even so I was beginning to run out of capacity on the MBA and only had 11GB free.
Part of the year I spend in my cave in Spain and although I have Internet, it's not fast, so cloud offerings are not really a viable solution. So I bit the bullet and went for the JetDrive 500 with the 480GB SSD.
First thing was backup. I have a Time Capsule (named Tardis for Dr Who fans) on the network and the latest Time Machine backup was an hour or so ago, so to backup changes since took just a couple of minutes.
The Jetdrive packaging is very Apple-esque as are the written installation instructions which are appalling in their brevity. What's needed is a written link to the installation video on YouTube (this is the latest one dated 29 May 2014).
A second complaint is that there's no mention in the installation instructions about JetDrive Toolbox that I understand is needed for TRIM support—whatever that is!
What nobody has commented on is the length of time needed to format the new SSD and then copy over the files. In the video it's about half a second, but to copy over my 829,000 files and then verify took just over four and a half hours. Obviously if you were starting off with a 64GB SSD your times would differ.
Opening the MBA case to install the new SSD revealed a pile of dirt and dust, so some cleaning was needed.
My Parallels Desktop VM was copied over together with Windows XP, however if I still had my Bootcamp partition with Windows 7 this wouldn't have copied using the procedure in the video. I had to give Microsoft Office my product key again, and had to sign into Dropbox again, otherwise everything seemed to work exactly as before.
I was surprised at the wide variation in reported speeds from the old SSD in Blackmagic Speed Test, maybe it was hampered by only having 11GB free space? Performance of the JetDrive is sizzling—write speeds have increased from 140-248 MB/s to around 430 MB/s, read speeds have increased from 140-210 MB/s to around 480 MB/s.
Since performing the upgrade I now have close on 240GB free space. I haven't as yet set up the old 256GB SSD as an external drive; I don't want to reformat it for a few days just to make sure everything is OK.
But so far, so good. Well pleased.
.
Part of the year I spend in my cave in Spain and although I have Internet, it's not fast, so cloud offerings are not really a viable solution. So I bit the bullet and went for the JetDrive 500 with the 480GB SSD.
First thing was backup. I have a Time Capsule (named Tardis for Dr Who fans) on the network and the latest Time Machine backup was an hour or so ago, so to backup changes since took just a couple of minutes.
The Jetdrive packaging is very Apple-esque as are the written installation instructions which are appalling in their brevity. What's needed is a written link to the installation video on YouTube (this is the latest one dated 29 May 2014).
A second complaint is that there's no mention in the installation instructions about JetDrive Toolbox that I understand is needed for TRIM support—whatever that is!
What nobody has commented on is the length of time needed to format the new SSD and then copy over the files. In the video it's about half a second, but to copy over my 829,000 files and then verify took just over four and a half hours. Obviously if you were starting off with a 64GB SSD your times would differ.
Opening the MBA case to install the new SSD revealed a pile of dirt and dust, so some cleaning was needed.
My Parallels Desktop VM was copied over together with Windows XP, however if I still had my Bootcamp partition with Windows 7 this wouldn't have copied using the procedure in the video. I had to give Microsoft Office my product key again, and had to sign into Dropbox again, otherwise everything seemed to work exactly as before.
I was surprised at the wide variation in reported speeds from the old SSD in Blackmagic Speed Test, maybe it was hampered by only having 11GB free space? Performance of the JetDrive is sizzling—write speeds have increased from 140-248 MB/s to around 430 MB/s, read speeds have increased from 140-210 MB/s to around 480 MB/s.
Since performing the upgrade I now have close on 240GB free space. I haven't as yet set up the old 256GB SSD as an external drive; I don't want to reformat it for a few days just to make sure everything is OK.
But so far, so good. Well pleased.
.
Last edited:
