OWC Aura SSD Upgrades for MBA ?!

[green86]

@r6mile is correct for this newer model drive from OWC. It is mentioned in the specs. It is because of the physical layout of the chips inside the drive. As I recall they are using two flash modules running in RAID0 to make it appear as one large drive, and this breaks TRIM and Bootcamp. There was discussion in the forums on this when the drives were released.

Your older, 2011 model uses a different drive that does not have this limitation.

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDAB2MB02/

Yea, that bootcamp thing is no longer a thing...

https://blog.macsales.com/36403-owc-reveals-apple-boot-camp-support-for-ssds

I stand corrected about the TRIM support though. However I've read ars's excellent article on trim vs. garbage collection and I'm skeptical about how much it's needed. I work in IT for a large university, and I'd estimate the student, faculty and staff population is 50%. Many are using the 2012 MB Pro that was sold through 2016 with upgraded HDDs to SSDs (we have a computer servicing depot right on campus) and I've not once seen a problem with write speeds or slow SSDs in general, even with people who've upgraded years ago. None have trim enabled.

 

[Weaselboy]

Yea, that bootcamp thing is no longer a thing...

https://blog.macsales.com/36403-owc-reveals-apple-boot-camp-support-for-ssds

And is there anyplace that states the drives are running in RAID 0? All I've come across is anecdotal speculation that the SSDs are running in RAID 0. No real evidence supports this that I can find.

Ah good... I did not know OWC had come out with that Bootcamp work around.

On the RAID thing, it is mentioned in this review.

The OWC Aura contains two SMI 2246 XT 4-channel controllers which are situated in a RAID configuration through a Marvell 9230 RAID controller. There are four unbranded 256MB MLC synchronous NAND flash chips which, once paired, create a RAID 0 volume with a 1TB capacity.

...also here.

In order to keep costs under control, OWC has opted to not use a native PCIe SSD controller. Instead, the PCIe Aura SSD uses a Marvell 9230 SATA RAID controller and a pair of Silicon Motion SM2256 SATA SSD controllers.

There was some discussion about that in the news thread also when he drives came out.
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...and I've not once seen a problem with write speeds or slow SSDs in general, even with people who've upgraded years ago. None have trim enabled.

It does not seem to be a problem for many people, but the write speed slow down is a real thing. You can find some of my posts where users had slow write speeds, then enabled TRIM and ran "fsck -fy" to TRIM unused blocks on the drive, and speeds were restored. So it does happen.

Edit: Here is an example.

My thing has always been with how easy it is to enable on newer Macs, there is really no reason not to do it.