Hello All, A few months ago I purchased a refurbished Macbook Air to replace the combo of my ipad and mac mini. I chose the "maxxed-out" eleven inch late 2010 MBA figuring I could survive a couple of years with the 1.6 GHz CPU and 4 GB of RAM, but also realizing I would need to upgrade the 128 GB SSD sooner rather than later. Last week I purchased a 240 GB SSD upgrade and was able to install this new drive with the itsy bit of vision I have left and I think this upgrade could be performed by anybody who has a bit of close-up vision or has sighted assistance, and also by totally blind folks who are patient and are confident in their computer repair and upgrade skills. If you aren't familiar with the dangers of static electricity and oily fingertips, the law of wandering tiny screws, and the tendency of tall coffee cups to become unbalanced when placed near a laptop, you should probably leave this one alone or get somebody else to do it for you. <grin>
The 2010 MBA's have an easily removable bottom cover that gives complete unimpeded access to the internal SSD, which is apparently the single upgradable part on this model of Macbook. The drive I purchased came with the two small screwdrivers needed to remove and replace the cover and SSD. I had only one step where I needed to use my vision, in combination with my iphone 4's video camera / magnifier. That step was locating the existing SSD and the single screw that holds it in place. The SSD in this MBA does not look or feel like a traditional hard drive. It is more like a traditional RAM module, just a small, flat circuit board with a row of chips on it. It is rectangular and measures approximately 1 inch by 4 inches and just a few millimeters thick. I had some difficulty locating and identifying the SSD module as it lies flat against the bottom of the mainboard and has no physical features that really make it recognizable to the fingertips. To help myself recognize what the SSD feels like, I removed the new SSD from it's packaging and gently ran my fingertips over the module to get an idea of what I should be feeling for inside the MBA. One end of the SSD module has a small screw hole and the other end has a male connector that slides into the female counterpart on the MBA's mainboard. The male connector is a small extension of the circuit board and has a small offset slot that helps identify which side should face up or down during insertion. Be sure to feel this slot on the existing SSD as you are removing it so you can know which side should face up or down. It is a snug fit and took a little gentle but firm wiggling to remove the old module and insert the new one. I used the accessible and free application called "Super Duper" to clone my existing SSD to an external USB drive and then back to the new SSD and this seems to have worked flawlessly. There are some claims that this new SSD has better performance and some features that will help prolong it's usable life, but for me it was all about the extra storage space so I'm not planning to run any geek tests. <smile> I usually purchase mac upgrade parts from Other World Computing, aka OWC, and that's where I got this SSD. The OWC drives for the late 2010 MBA currently come in four sizes: 180, 240, 360 and 480 GB. They are not cheap but as far as I can tell they are the only SSD upgrades currently available and approved by Apple for this model MBA. Here's a link to the OWC site for these drives: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Express OWC has some good installation instructions on their site, and a quick Google returns a number of other hits with step-by-step instructions for performing this upgrade, Here's a pretty clear one: http://www.wholelottarob.com/gadgets/2011/5/9/120gb-not-on-macbook-air-not-enough-consider-upgrade-up-to-4.html If anybody would like to discuss my experience with this in more detail, please feel free to contact me off list. Cheers, Bryan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
