The outer shell of Glyph’s drive is composed entirely of dense, durable anodized aluminum, and a rugged protective sleeve is also included. Build qualityįrom a pure build quality perspective, the Glyph Atom SSD is easily the top drive on this list for MacBook Air. In other words, all of these drives will provide performance within the ballpark of one another, and all of these MacBook Air SSDs are suitable for 4K workflows.īecause the drives feature such similar performance, you should probably judge these drives based on other factors, such as build quality, portability, and price.

The best performer, the Glyph Atom, was only better than the worst performing drive by 21MB/s read and 13MB/s write. Combined, the drives averaged QuickBench sequential read speeds of 529MB/s and write speeds of 491MB/s. Subscribe to 9to5Mac on YouTube for more videos PerformanceĪll of the drives tested are SATA III drives and thus feature similar read/write performance. I amassed a list of five portable MacBook Air SSDs, or six if you include the Lacie and Seagate SSDs, which are the same exterior of colors and branding.Īll of the SSDs feature a 3-year limited warranty, while some, like the Seagate and Lacie-branded drives, offer special perks like a free limited-time Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. To be included in this list, each drive must have at least 1TB of storage, connect directly to a Mac via a single USB-C cable, support USB 3.1 gen 2, and be completely bus-powered and truly portable. For those with the budget for a Thunderbolt 3-enabled SSD, we’ll be back with a follow-up post to consider the best choices in that realm. USB 3.1 SSDs are less expensive than faster Thunderbolt 3 SSDs, such as the Samsung X5 ( review). The reason for this decision is that the Thunderbolt 3 ports are fully compatible with much less expensive USB devices and cables. In this hands-on video walkthrough, we take a look at some of the best MacBook Air SSDs.Īlthough the 2018 MacBook Air supports Thunderbolt 3, in this post, we’re specifically focusing on USB 3.1 SSDs. The good news is that there is an ever-growing list of external SSD options that work great with modern Macs. The base $1199 model of the 2018 MacBook Air is a solid entry-level laptop barring one exception - its paltry 128GB PCIe-based SSD.

1tb ssd drive for macbook air