The process is quite easy, but very, very slow. With no optical drive and no external optical drive (you can buy one, but I passed on the option), that means installation over WiFi using another host computer. I finally decided on a straightforward re-installation from scratch (probably better anyway), except the MacBook Air's Achilles heel is that installations aren't all that convenient. I suspect the original hard drive was on its last legs and the replacement was even more timely. Unfortunately - despite the fact that I'd verified the health of the internal drive prior to the operation - both the backup image and the now backup drive refused to restore to the SSD. Of course I had cloned the internal drive before taking everything apart, and the OWC kit also included a handy external USB enclosure to slip the old drive into, so it should have been easy. Taking apart the MacBook Air was a little more challenging than other models (Apple really does pack things tightly in there), but the real challenge was re-installing the OS. The operating system, applications and local copies of works in progress took up only 10Gb or so. While 30GB doesn't sound like much storage space, I use that particular machine only for writing and it's always been optimized to reduce the load on CPU, HD and battery. My wife (with a little hint) ordered a 30GB ZIF SSD kit for about $100 as a Christmas gift. I didn't have to look much further than OWC, the company that supplied the SSD I reviewed earlier. Besides, I've always wanted an excuse to open it up and see what makes it tick.
It's a pain tracking down a suitable replacement, but given the fact that the current generation of this model of notebook starts at around $1300, I figured it was worth looking around.
This is a first generation model, pretty pokey and with a small capacity hard drive that uses a hard to find ZIF connector. Following the success I had with upgrading my MacBook Pro's hard drive with a SSD (solid state drive), I decided to to try the same thing with my MacBook Air.
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