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OWC unleashes Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G SSD, peps up your 2011 MacBook Air
So, you've got a 2011 MacBook Air, and you say its SSD's read / write speeds are letting you down? Well, Other World Computing would be happy to quell your woes with its SandForce-equipped Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G. The company's latest storage upgrade steps things up from its 3Gb/s versions, promising to get your tasks zooming with consistent speeds of "over 500MB/s" (achieved by utilizing the '11 Air's SATA Revision 3.0, 6Gb/s bus). The 120GB variant will set you back a wallet-thinning $350, while 240GBs will cost you a whopping 600 bones -- hey, no one ever said performance like this comes cheap. They're available now from OWC, and you'll find full details in the PR past the break.
AngelBird's PCIe SSD solution brings breakneck speeds, achievable prices, 'incremental awesomeness'
PCIe SSD solutions tend to be two things: stupidly fast and stupidly expensive. With read performance of up to 1GB/s and writes happening at up to 900MB/s the Angelbird Wings solution certainly has the speed. And, at a starting price of $239 for a 16GB model, the pricing isn't too bad -- for this sort of setup, anyway. What you're getting for that money is an expandable PCIe controller board with slots for up to four SSDs of 120GB in size, each offering SandForce 1200 controllers. With one board you'll get pedestrian read and write speeds of just under 300MB/s. But, with each new drive you basically multiply that, with the maximum figures quoted above coming with four. Interestingly, the controller comes with its own onboard Linux flavor called Virtue, a full UI that you can boot directly into and get all your RAID ducks in a row. Full cost for a fully kitted out system with four boards? $1399, which is hardly cheap for a mere 500GB or so of storage, but is a solid price for 1GB/s performance.
