OWC Aura SSD – The Best Way to Upgrade Your MacBook

Since Apple slimmed down the design of their products up to a point where even the 1.8 inch hard became too bulky, the earliest MacBook Air model, including Apple’s Retina MacBook Pro have relied entirely on SSDs for internal storage. Instead of adopting the mSATA to the later M.2 form factor, Apple’s SSDs only used custom pinouts and form factors. Because of this, the market for third-party upgrades was being kept very small. Very few companies have manufactured SSDs with Apple-specific form factors. Some of them include Other World Computing (OWC) and Transcend. The difference between the two is that Transcend generally uses Silicon Motion controllers while OWC uses SandForce controllers. But, both of their offerings have been limited to SATA-based SSDs until recently.

In 2013 Apple migrated their MacBook Pro SSD to PCI-based interfaces and the drives they used were supplied by SanDisk, Toshiba, and Samsung. Finally, OWC produced a compatible replacement which was released as part of their Aura SSD product line. The OWC Aura PCIe SSD uses an AHCI protocol just as the Apple originals. So far Apple only uses and supports NVMe for the Retina MacBook which doesn’t feature a removable SSD. OWC’s choices for SSD controller were limited by the requirement to use AHCI instead of NVMe and while Apple is a big enough customer to convince Samsung to produce a custom form factor SM951, OMC is not.

So, in order tho keep the costs in check, OWC decided not to use a native PCIe SSD controller and instead the PCIe Aura SSD uses a Marvell 9230 SATA RAID controller along with a pair of Silicon Motion SM2256 SATA SSD controllers. While the PCIe Aura SSD does have the potential to outperform the SATA SSDs, it wont be able to come near the peak transfer rates of some of the recent Samsung SM951-based Apple originals.

Based on the measurements conducted by OWC of the first PCIe SSDs which Apple used back in 2013, the Aura SSD slightly outperform the slowest 128 GB SanDisk/Marvel drive, however, that advantage might disappear over time without TRIM. This means that the only strong selling point for the Aura SSD is capacity. The MacBook Air can be configured by Apple up to 512 GB of storage, but the Aura SSD can provide up to 1TB and it is much cheaper than the Apple SSD upgrades.

The Aura MacBook Pro SSD is sold either as a bare drive or with whole upgrade kit which includes all the necessary screwdrivers required to install the SSD, plus a 3.0 USB enclosure to facilitate data migration.