I have been using the original Macbook Air 1st Generation 1,1 Laptop for quite some time now and like many others i was also wondering what can be done to speed up this beauty. The only component which can be upgraded easily is the hard disk and that’s what i started searching for. This laptop comes with Samsung 1.8” 80 GB PATA Hard Disk by default and replacing it with another HDD makes no sense at all. So after searching on the net, i found out that people are using third party SSD’s which are specifically designed for this model and they are getting very good performance after this upgrade. So i started my bit of research to find out which one to buy. The one which i shortlisted was KingSpec. The reason was simple, it’s the cheapest SSD available for this model. I bought a 128 GB KingSpec SSD for 130$ off eBay. The other alternative no doubt was OWC, but it was expensive, for a 60 GB SSD, i will have to shell out 159$. The reviews were very strong for OWC as compared to KingSpec but for me VALUE FOR MONEY was more important because no matter how fast the SSD is, the legacy PATA connector required for connecting the SSD to the Mac would limit it’s capability unfortunately.

After receiving the SSD, it was time to open the MBA and all thanks to ifixit, it was just a matter of 15-20 mins of investment, my MBA was all set to boot with a brand new SSD for the first time.

The setup was done using an USB installer for Lion which i had prepared. All the steps required like formatting the disk, creating partitions went on smoothly. There was no noticeable performance difference when installing Lion. I thought it will complete in a breeze, but it took the usual 30 mins approx to get the system ready. So the first reaction was that there is no difference in performance after upgrading to this SSD. Even there is no major difference in the boot time in my case.

But yes, there is a significant performance improvement no doubt. Before upgrading to this SSD, i was running Snow Leopard on this Mac because Lion was struggling like anything. But now i am running Lion after upgrading to this SSD and the performance is much better as compared to what it was before. I am able to smoothly run Lion now which i wasn’t able to before. Applications load quickly and honestly speaking i am very satisfied with KingSpec.

I ran xbench to find out the real story. Have a look at the difference between the read/write operations of the old Samsung 80 HDD vs the KingSpec 128 GB SSD.

All in all, a 50% boost in the overall IO operations and what else can i say, i am quite happy with the change.