MacBook Air Now Shipping With Faster SSD?

If you’ve bought a MacBook Air recently, you may have a faster SSD than a model that was purchased just a few months ago. The difference in read and write speed is noticeable, the above chart shows the ‘old’ Toshiba TS128C drive atop a ‘new’ SM128C drive, which Anandtech assumes is produced by Samsung, saying:

There is no absolute confirmation yet that Samsung manufactures the SM128C, but all indicators point that way. Regardless of manufacturer, the SM128C appears noticeably faster in sequential read/write performance. What we can’t confirm is how the two models differ in more intense testing

You can check what model SSD you have by going to System Profiler > Hardware > Serial-ATA, from here you will see APPLE SSD TS###C with the ### representing the capacity of the drive. I have a MacBook Air that was purchased in February and it has a Toshiba model TS064C SSD in it, so if there was an SSD change it must have happened very recently, which is substantiated by several commenters on 9to5Mac who say their Air’s bought in March have the new drive.

Anandtech also mentions they haven’t been able to test TRIM support on the new drives, and it’s not clear if TRIM is enabled on these new MacBook Air’s in the same fashion that TRIM is enabled on new MacBook Pro‘s.

Mac OS X Lion supports TRIM natively, but if you don’t want to wait until Lion, TRIM can also be enabled in Mac OS X 10.6 with a hack.