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Only 13 days remain until the anticipated shipment date 0f 1/21/2012 for OWC’s new 480GB Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G for MacBook Air 2011 editions. This portable form factor SSD that is capable of up to 511 MB/s sustained reads, and up to 448 MB/s sustained writes leaps to the top of the current marketplace as the smallest and most powerful SSD available!
This dynamo of an SSD provides nearly 4 times the maximum storage capacity, and is 3 times faster than the original factory options available on your MacBook Air 2011 Edition!
This drive is controlled by a SandForce 2281 series processor, with 7% over-provisioning. It features DuraClass(TM) Technologies: DuraWrite, Intelligent Block Management & Wear Leveling, Intelligent Read Disturb Management, Intelligent “Recycling”, RAISE (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements), and best-in-class ECC protection.
The Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G comes in capacities of 120GB, 240GB, and the 480GB drive featured here. These SSD’s are backed by OWC’s three-year warranty. The drives ship as a complete kit; with all the tools and a free video necessary for installation. Another rarity in this day and age — this product is made in the USA!
To achieve the higher bandwidth potential of the SATA 6 GB/s standard, the OWC Mercury Pro Aura Express 6G SSD’s utilize synchronous toggle NAND instead of commonly used asynchronous NAND. Synchronous NAND enables reads and writes to be “synced” with the SSD processor’s clock signal for maximum data throughput. The NAND is Tier 1, Grade A, 2x-nm multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory. This helps these drives achieve the posted speeds, along with 4K random read/writes of up to 60,000 IOPS. The OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G 480GB SSD can be yours for $1149.00.
Before you cringe at the price tag, consider this: For this amount of storage to fit onto such a small footprint, OWC is using 8 X 64GB of the premium-quality synchronous MLC toggle NAND modules. Such a configuration has not yet been seen in any other SSD’s that we are aware of. If you can afford this top-flite SSD, it will make a terrific upgrade for your MacBook Air 2011 Edition!