Apple Macbook Air Gets Updated SSD; Hint, It’s Faster

Apple has upgraded their MacBook Air units. On Friday it was discovered that new units going out to customers now feature what appears to be a Samsung produced 470 series drive, replacing the Toshiba X-Gale SSD. If that information is correct it would mean a significant speed boost to the company’s hard drive.

For example, the 128GB Toshiba drive offers 210MB per second reads and 176MB per second write speeds, while the Samsung 470 series drive of the same size provides 261GB reads and 210MB second write speeds.

Apple has designated the drive as the SM128C and it also supported Native Command Queuing, a feature lacking on the X-Gale SSD.

Apple hasn’t made a big announcement about the change, but it’s pretty routing for them mid-sales cycle to change a component if it improves performance and becomes cheaper to source. [via Electronista]