120gb 5400rpm in a Rev.A

Hi, all.
This is my first post, I recently bought a used MBA, I always want one when it first came out, finally wait until now because of the big price drop

My first mod to my MBA is to upgrade the hard drive.

I wasn't pay much attention when I purchase this replacement hard disk, didn't notice the MBA only takes 5mm height, as most 1.8" in the market are 8mm.

But since it's in my hand right now, I decided to put it on see if the MBA recognizes it.

Not too much surprise, leopard installation went very smoothly.

After the installation, the available space is about 95gb.

And because of the 5400rpm, it feels faster.

Too bad the bottom won't close because of the height of this drive.

But at least this gives me an idea, and I know there's a Toshiba 1.8" 120gb 4200rpm 5mm out there, and it should fits perfectly in MBA.

Anyway, I'm still debating myself rather getting this Toshiba drive or a Samsung 32gb SSD(Same drive as used in the Rev.A SSD version, but different capacity)
As the price of these two drives are pretty much the same (around $150 range)
I have another computer for my main work, so I'm toward getting a 32gb SSD

Here are some picture taken from the iphone.

bobdard said:

I think the 120 is a better value. I don't say that because bigger = better; I do like the idea of having SSD, but to be honest I don't think you're going to see THAT MUCH of a difference in SSD and 4200 when its on a MBA (with lower performance graphics and CPU) .... I mean, what would you do on this computer to see the difference that a SSD would offer? I'm not trying to bash the MBA in being slow; have one myself and love it, but I just don't think its worth it to get a super small SSD for 150 when you're not doing anything HDD intensive on it....

Click to expand...

The reason getting a SSD is for the instant access, as most of the 1.8" drives have very high access time( around 20ns) where SSD have 0.1ns, for the transfer rate, SSD does not have a big advantage over hdd(38mb/s vs. 50mb/s)
So you will notice the difference when you open up a program or file compare with the hdd. And not to mention there's no moving part, so no need to worry when you carry it around while its running, also the power consumption is a plus.

The SSD you can find on fleabay, just remember the interface for MBA Rev.A is ZIF.

The bump stuff is the drive itself, this drive has two platters(the original 80g has one platter so does the new Toshiba 5mm drive).

Here's the picture when you try to put the case on.