How to replace Apple Macbook Air 2010 3.1 SSD with MX-Katana and performance analysis

I love my Macbook Air 2010 3.1 11" for its portability and size but the stock Toshiba SSD is lack luster in performance and plus I only have the 64GB version. After checking out my available upgrade options I got my hands on the Mach Xtreme MX-KATANA 128GB.

For those not familiar with Mach Xtreme, they are a manufacture focussed on the enthusiast sector and high end. I reviewed their MX Armor 2000 9-9-9-24 2x4GB memory kit in a shoot out for APC earlier in the year and I was suitably impressed.



The Product

Name: MX-KATANA
Model: MXSSD2MKAT-128G
Maximum read performance: 275 MB/s
Maximum write performance: 225 MB/s
Sustained Write: 130 MB/s
IOPS: 25,000

Very impressive specifications for a notebook drive, lets hope my heightened expectations stay true in the performance analysis.

 

  

I was very happy to find the necessary screw drivers included in the package as Apple use a "5-Point Pentalobe" driver, which isn't exactly a screwdriver most people have in their collection.

The Installation

Before you begin, I suggest making a copy of your existing SSD with a tool like carbon copy cloner (CCC). If you use CCC to clone your SSD onto an external USB hard drive, after you have installed your new SSD you can boot from the USB clone and use CCC to clone the data onto your new MX-KATANA SSD.

I have created the below youtube video which details the complete process of removing the back cover, installing the new SSD and replacing the cover.

Here are some more photos of the installation process.

 

Benchmarks

I have decided to use XBench and QuickBench to benchmark the existing Toshiba SSD and the new MX-KATANA, this will allow me to directly compare the two.

I set QuickBench to 5 loops and for Xbench I reran and averaged the results over 3 complete runs.

Performance Analysis


Starting with the QuickBench (QB) average for sequential read, we see the KATANA take a small lead of around 10 MB/s, nothing spectacular but solid. Moving onto QB random write average and again we see a small margin of only 7 MB/s.

I also listed the 1024K random write, this is not an anomaly but a consistent result I see across all of my benchmarks. As the write size is increased the performance leans more in the direction of the KATANA.

Moving onto the XBench results we see a meagre 1% advantage to the KATANA in the disk test score results. In the un-cached write 4K results the stock Toshiba SSD actually takes a lead of around 9 MB/s, but the victory is short lived when the KATANA smashes it in large 256K read operations by 20%.

These results certainly give a clear indication that the KATANA is a great option for those using large cluster sizes, but who is? I don't know many people using anything bigger than around 8-16K, unless it is a dedicated drive for video/audio editing.

That being said if you are working with big files the KATANA will have big benefits for you, but for everyday use you can expect around a 10% performance gain over the stock SSD.