Kingspec 128GB 1.8″ PATA/zif SSD For MacBook Air Rev.A

I got a used MacBook Air about 6 months ago from a computer shop here in Japan (PC Depot) that sells premium used computers and components. The price was right and I was wanting a truly portable machine (with full sized keyboard) so I went for it. The package also included the external CD/DVD-R drive which, although you do have the option to connect to the drive of another computer wirelessly, is crucial if you’re going to be installing software on the computer 🙂 . It is a Rev. A (1st model of the MacBook Air) which meant that the hard drive interface uses only PATA drives via a ZIF connection. That meant, originally, that options for hard drive upgrade were limited.

Initially I couldn’t find much information about solid state drives of the size that I wanted (at least 128Gig) or the information that I did find told me that SSD’s for the Rev. A were either too expensive or weren’t recognized by the system etc. etc. Recently however, I started to see quite a few SSD’s for sale on eBay and the price was in a more “considerable” range so I took the plunge and purchased a Kingspec 128 Gig solid state drive and the following is my experience with installing, setting up, and using the drive. It’s been fun and exciting so far! Solid state memory has to be the direction for the future of memory storage. Less power consumption, faster data access, and much less prone to failure as there are no moving parts.

Anyway, after receiving the drive (very well packed) directly from Kingspec in China, I admired how small it is and then proceeded to disassemble my MacBook Air. There are a slew of video guides on Air tear down and hard drive installation on YouTube. Here are the two I used.

Back case removal

Hard drive removal

The removal of the old drive and installation of the new SSD took less than an hour and that includes answering the phone once in the middle of the process 🙂 . I cloned my hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner prior to removing it so getting my system, exactly as it was on the old drive, was a snap. I definitely have to make a donation to Bombich Software!!

Started up the computer and aside from the 30 seconds or so it took the computer to identify the system on the drive, the drive is amazingly fast!! It is noticeably faster than the old 80Gig Toshiba drive. Startup from a complete shutdown took about 1 mintue and 27 seconds with the old drive and now takes about 43 seconds!! Quickness while using the computer is equally drastically faster!! (Note – The delay to find the system goes down to something like 12 seconds or so once you select the drive as your startup drive from the System Prefernces.)

One thing of note is that if you plan to install OS’s other than MacOS on your machine (I plan to install Vista…shame on me) and you’re going to use BootCamp. Make sure to use the GUID partition map when you partition the drive. When I partitioned the drive initially the default partition map was set to MBR and I didn’t notice it so I had to go back and re-clone, re-partition, and re-install in order to get things in order to install Vista using BootCamp. I’m guessing the default MBR was a result of the original formatting scheme on the drive.

That’s it! If you decide to go SSD on your Rev. A. I hope this helps.

Peace (Jason)