I own a mid 2012 MacBook Air 11 inch, and for the longest time I mistakenly thought that the hard drive was soldered into the main board. I’ve even considered purchasing a new fully spec 13 inch Retina MacBook Pro or Dell XPS 13 because of the 128 GB hard drive space limitation I had. So I was really happy to see Other World Computing (aka MacSales) selling new hard drives for old MacBook Air machines like mine. I’m a big fan of OWC, and have bought their Mac Mini data doubler product in the past to upgrade my Mac Mini’s to dual SSD drives.

Installing the new SSD is really simple process. The only problem I encountered was completely my fault. OWC has two offerings, one is just the SSD for $199.99, and the second is the SSD Upgrade Kit for $219.99, which includes custom Pentalobe screwdriver that is needed to open MacBook Air. I only purchased the SSD drive, so I had to made a quick run to my local Fry’s store and purchase the iFixit Pentalobe screwdriver. That’s why I would suggest simply buying the SSD Upgrade Kit since it also includes an external USB enclosure that gives you the ability to use the old SSD as an external USB drive.

After installing the new SSD, then it was just a matter of connecting an external USB drive where I saved my encrypted Time Machines backups too, and restore from the lasted backup. My MacBook Air was up and running in less than two hours with a new bigger and faster 480GB SSD.

I’ve just added new life to my four year old MacBook Air. Performance has never been a problem with my laptop. At most, I’ll run two virtual machines concurrently. So for the type of work I do, the 8GB’s of RAM is sufficient enough for my needs. Now the increased of storage, I see myself continue using the MacBook Air easily for another 3-5 more years.