New Apple MacBook Air Uses PCIe-Based SSDs For Super Fast Data Speeds

Yesterday Apple updated its MacBook Air with new models for 2013. The notebooks don’t look too different, but inside they have been updated to Intel’s 4th Generation Core processors that go by the code name Haswell and it turns out that they have significant improvements when it comes to the storage drives. The new MacBook Air no longer uses SATA drives, but has moved on to the PCIe interface instead. It appears that the Macbook Air uses a PCIe 2.0 x2 interface that is capable of 1GB/s in each direction. Initial benchmarks done by Anand and others show that the new MacBook Air is capable of nearly 800MB/s read and write speeds. Not too shabby at all and we all knew that the retail SSD market was headed to the PCIe interface. It’s taken years to get there, but go figure that Apple was the first to fully embrace it. Time for the Intel Ultrabook to keep up!