SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) refers to the technology standard for connecting hard drives, solid state drive, and optical drives to the computer’s motherboard. Luckily, advances in host interfaces invariably stay ahead of the pace of drive technologies, always allowing room to push speeds a bit farther.

If you are, it’s time to get up to speed!Įver faster drive technology, brought about by faster spinning disks, increased cache, advances in controller architecture, and a host of other factors keeps pushing the host interface to become the bottleneck for read and write speeds. If you’re into vintage computers and you think patience is a virtue that can only be honed by waiting for programs to respond, maybe you’re still rocking a drive with a PATA interface. 5AĮvery hard drive or solid state drive you’ve used in the past ten years is likely to have used either a SATA interface, or more recently a PCI Express interface. Generation 1: MacBook Air (Late 2010 – Mid 2011).On the Pro, make sure the optical drive works - and doesn't eat CD / DVDs. The most valuable 'upgradeable' item on the Pro might be the battery, depending on how many cycles it's gone thru, and if the plan is to use it mostly as a portable.īoth models haven't had any substantial internal upgrades in several years (the Air closet to current, though - not saying much), while obviously you need to check the screen and the keyboards to ensure all's good there. The Pro certainly upgradeable (for a price) and its got the horsepower on board to do processor-heavy lifting (but if you're using most included apps or as a WP or to cruise the internet, its really not required), but that's not the only thing comparatively heavy. And, so far, I've been able to upgrade the OS without any significant usage issues. I was concerned about the storage on the Air (since long dismissed - tons of stuff: lots of docs and pdf, over 1000 pics, 30 films, 1200 tunes, and still 40GB free - bigger, less-often accessed stuff on an portable drive) I liked the idea of flash drive over HDD (without a pricey 'upgrade') I wasn't overly concerned over the RAM (given the type of software I ran - no CAD or other media-heavy editing) I didn't need a optical drive (I had an USB external, portable one that I hardly ever used) and I really liked the drop in weight and overall size (essentially, not far off the size of an iPad, but a 'real' computer with useful ports) for travel / portability, so that's what had me go to the 11'. When I initially started looking around at Mac notebooks, I looked at the Airs (11 and 13') as well as the Pro. You're really looking at two computers meant for two different things and users.

Macbook air mid 2013 hard drive