In a move that was quite rather unannounced, it appears that Apple has opted to move to a speedier SSD for the MacBook Air.  When exactly this transpired is unknown, but one thing for sure is that the Samsung SM128C model is a lot faster than MacBook Airs that are sporting the Toshiba TS128C model.

Anandtech had originally made the catch about the change in drives.  9 to 5 Mac had also reported that sure enough a MacBook Air of theirs from late 2010 did have a Toshiba SSD in it, and then sure enough a new MacBook Air that was purchased about a month ago had carried a Samsung SSD.  As mentioned above though, the change in name isn't the only difference.  According to Anandtech, there's a fairly large difference in performance:

The interesting aspect is that the SM128C models provide quite a nice performance bump in at least one performance metric.  Benchmarks posted by users show that the SM128C manages up to 260MB/s read and 210MB/s write speeds.  In our tests (and corroborating what users have reported), the TS128C offers speeds of up to 210MB/s read and 185MB/s write.  The SM128C also supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) while the TS128C does not.  The performance figures match the figures of Samsung 470 Series pretty well, which Samsung quotes as providing up to 250MB/s read and 220MB/s write.  The Samsung 470 Series uses Samsung's own controller with model number S3C29MAX01-Y340.

So for our MacBook Air users out there, which model do you have?  If you've had the opportunity to use models with the different drives, have you been able to notice a difference?  Feel free to leave your experiences below!

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