The positive things first:
- Pretty packaging (Apple-inspired)
- The USB Case fits well with the MacBook Air, is well made and attacks on quality
- Cloning the old SSD and the installation of the new SSD were very easy to deal with and without complications ("Kai S." has already written this in his critique a perfect guide, therefore I repeat here)
- My wife has again a lot of space on your MBA
The less than perfect things:
- The old SSD (in this case, a Toshiba 128GB) does not fit perfectly into the USB Case as the Transcend (because the chips are arranged apparently to millimeters differently, sits one of the inner rubber dampers now and not next to one of the chips, which is why gentle force is required to screw up the case)
- The downloadable software from Transcend claims TRIM would be activated; the Mac System Properties argue the opposite; the attempt to disable TRIM on the Transcend software to it afterwards to reauthorize, resulting in an error message; I had to manually activate the console TRIM therefore (necessary commands can be found via Google)
- The old SSD USB Case does not work reliably on all devices to USB 2, here I have to just get a split cable for additional power supply via a second port to buy
And last, the negative surprise: the performance (Attention: see corrections at the end of the review!)
The original SSD (as written by Toshiba, therefore the slower delivered variant) has most recently values of around 185/165 MB / s R / W supplied (115GB of eff. 120GB is encrypted).
Since this is below the options of MBA (as the manufacturer also available Samsung proves), and Transcend indicating higher values, I would have expected an improvement here.
Therefore, it was surprising that no better values were obtained after installation.
Quite bad it was after enabling encryption.
At just 135/120 MB / s R / W Transcend is significantly slower than the original built-Toshiba (which only had half the capacity, and was littered about 95% - so did not have the best conditions for good write-values) ,
This is of course hugely disappointing.
The performance of the SSD in the old USB Case USB 3.0 is minimally worse than internally in the MBA. The controller is identified as ASMedia, unfortunately without product number.
The slightly poorer performance is probably due to the lack of UASP - but I must still verify separately.
So bottom line, a convenient memory expansion, but unfortunately not perfect.
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Corrections:
The USB Case is recognized by Windows as a SCSI device, thus supports UASP.
(A version of firmware was April of May, delivered) After the firmware update to reach without encryption, a R / W performance of 270/210 MB / s. That's very fine. The performance of encryption has increased, and is now, after all, at around 180/160 MB / s - as this is the value of the old hard drive, I assume that limited from this speed the processor.
