Apple’s newest revision of the MacBook Air has a secret weapon packed into its tiny little frame. Rather than the pokey 4200rpm hard drive its predecessors ran on, the new MacBook Airs are sporting the latest buzz-inducing hardware in high-speed data storage: a solid-state drive.

We found that if you put a stock 1.4GHz MacBook Air (2010) up against a stock 2.66GHz MacBook Pro 13” (2010), the Air can write a 500MB file up to 20% faster (meaning takes less time to do the same process) than the MacBook Pro. Unzipping a 1.0GB file is up to 20% faster on the Air too. The Air is faster despite a 1.26GHz processor speed difference!!! That’s some SSD power.

Obviously, this is due to the speed of the SSD drive; adding an SSD can significantly improve performance for any disk-intensive activity. This is not really a new concept; this sort of thing has been mentioned here before. What makes this particular nugget of information extra-interesting is that Apple seems to be leveraging their SSDs as a way to improve performance while keeping processor speed (and, as a result, the heat generated) down.

What really caught our eye, though, is something many would overlook: the MacBook Air’s SSD achieved a transfer peak data rate up to 213MB/s. OWC Mercury Extreme SSDs have achieved peak data rates of 285MB/s!

That means that by simply upgrading your Mac with our SSD, you can improve your Mac’s performance significantly! We did a few tests just to see how big a gain you can get with our SSD over the factory stock HD. Article Continues…