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lbjsong

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 8, 2009
121
19
I am looking to buy a MBA rev. A with 80GB HDD
then I want to upgrade this with SSD to speed up the machine.
I don't care about GB's as long as I have 16GB ish.

any aftermarket SSD that is compatitible with MBA rev A?

I heard Great things about Runcore.
But Any other options?

thx in advance

PS:
Would this work?
http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX27150(ME).aspx

PS2
Would it be a good idea to buy one now?
or just buy REV.3 refurb?
No probs watching Youtue HD??
 

Maks

macrumors member
Feb 26, 2009
84
0
Runcore. Check out their site, or do a search on here, there are a few different threads.

You will get mixed reviews about the Rev. A on here. The speed increase is worth the extra price of a B/C assuming you don't get one with a bum display.
 

lbjsong

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 8, 2009
121
19
:)

I will probably use this as a secondary cpu.
so I won't ask for much you know. at least in terms of performances.
anyways.
is it okay to watch HD YouTube Videos?
thx
 

BoyRacer

macrumors member
Sep 21, 2003
47
39
is it okay to watch HD YouTube Videos?
thx

I have a MacBookAir Rev A, 1.6GHz, 80 GB HDD. I've found that playing video of any kind (YouTube Flash, YouTube HTML5 video, QuickTime Player or VLC or Movist playing M4V, etc) causes the fan to kick in very quickly. The fan will continue to spin loudly for ages after the video has stopped playing. The processor is underpowered for playing video.

Perhaps readers with Rev B and Rev C MBA models (1.86 & 2.13 GHz) can let us know if they experience similar fan noise under similar loads or during similar usage.

I don't expect moving to SSD from HDD will impact the fan noise much at all; I'm convinced the fan noise is due to underpowered processors. Instead, I'm waiting until I can get a decently priced refurb Rev C MBA from Apple's refurb Store - with at least 1.86GHz processor and definitely SSD.

Also, we shouldn't have to wait long for a MBA to ship with Core i3 or i5 processors - then we can find out (from reviews and forum posts) if the newer models are a significant improvement over earlier models - particularly with regard to processor load while playing video.

Fingers crossed, newer processors will play common h.264-based video without becoming over-taxed and therefore overheated - causing the fans to run all the time.

Aside from these video-related issues, I find the Rev A HDD model to perform VERY well for WebSurfing (Safari, FireFox, Chrome), Email (Mail.app, Web-based Gmail), Word Processing (Scrivener and Evernote).

However, an SSD would change that 'VERY' to 'EXCELLENT'; the HDD models are 4200rpm - very very slow.
 
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