- #Transcend late 2010 macbook air ssd replacement skin
- #Transcend late 2010 macbook air ssd replacement full
Then put the back of your MacBook Air back on and power it up! Then pop in your new cloned Transcend SSD and replace that screw.Ĭompare the two SSDs, Samsung above, Transcend below:Īt this point, you might as well pop your old SSD into the enclosure and secure it with the enclosed 3 screws. It will either be Samsung or Toshiba and will have a Black Torx Screw holding it in. Power through this and locate the SSD on the bottom.
#Transcend late 2010 macbook air ssd replacement skin
I’ve heard that this is mostly dead skin which gives me the willies. The inside of the MBA was surprisingly dusty. Pro Tip – the longer screws are the ones in the top middle near the hinge. You’ll want to remove all of the screws on the bottom of the MacBook Air with the provided Torx screwdriver.
Now comes the hardware part of the journey. These 2 pages of a small world language book are it! The instructions provided are pretty sparse (just the way I like them). USB 3 shouldn’t take much more than 10 minutes for the same amount of data.
#Transcend late 2010 macbook air ssd replacement full
A very full 128GB SSD took about 1:45 to transfer to the new Transcend SSD with the USB 2 being the big bottleneck. The cloning of the drive actually takes some serious time because the 2011 MacBook Air is USB 2. Then reboot the computer from the recovery partition. The first step is hooking up the Transcend SSD to the USB3 cable with the enclosed adapter.Ī quick BlackMagic speed test to set a baseline for the upgrade. One more level down, you’ll see the Torx screwdrivers you’ll need, the “paltry” instructions and cable for the enclosure. Remove that and you’ll see the enclosure you’ll use to transfer data and which can eventually turn your old SSD into a big fast USB3 stick. The first level you’ll see your new SSD on top. The Transcend packaging is extremely nice. Spoiler alert: here’s Transcend’s video which makes it all look incredibly easy: Luckily, it is a Samsung drive and not the slower Toshiba drives that came with these MacBook Airs. My wife’s 128GB MacBook Air from 2011 has been “full” for about a year now and every few months I have to run Cocktail to remove some caches, etc. and keep it going for a few more months. I got my hands on a demo unit and took it for a test drive… Keep in mind these are SATA-based SSDs and Apple’s latest round of MacBook Pro/Airs came with speedier PCIe SSDs so you can’t use these on Apple’s late 2013/2014 models (see bottom of the article for compatibility list). Even better, Transcend just released larger versions in 480GB and 960GB sizes to blow your SATA III MacBook Air or Pro into new worlds of space. See that little $190 daughter card up there^? It houses 240GB of Transcend SSD and it could replace the 64GB or 128GB SSD that came in your MacBook Air in as little as 5 minutes.