Transcend 256GB JDL130 JetDrive Lite 130 Expansion Card for MacBook Air 13 Inch (Late 2010 - 2017) up to 95/55 MB/s TS256GJDL130

Brilliant little gizmo! Our little Macbook Air only has 256gb of storage on it and these days that isn't much. I remember the olden days when 256gb would be more than anybody could have ever imagined they would need, but I am rambling, sorry.The JetDrive fitted easily into the SD card socket on the Macbook Air, I formatted it using the Mac Utilities app to the correct Mac Journaled version and it just worked.Easy.I use it for a virtual machine version of Windows 10 and it works perfectly, there is no noticeable lag and all the Windows functions work without issue. Of course the specs will show it is not as fast as your SSD, but in practice that doesn't seem to matter, we haven't noticed any speed issues even running a virtual machine, so for normal file purpose it would probably be even quicker. Upgrading the disk size on a Macbook is very expensive, this Jetdrive provides 50% more disk space for a fraction of what it would have cost for a larger HDD in the Macbook Air. I don't know how easy it is to remove, I have heard it might be tricky, but there is no need to remove it once it is fitted, it is there, I can't see it because it fits so nice and flush, it has become part of the Mac and they are very happy together.

I bought this for my son's MacBook Air 13", to act as a built-in external storage device to hold a Windows installation, so that he can boot from there into Windows 10 when he needs to. It works very well, and my son is very happy.While it fits very nicely and firmly into MacBook Air's card reader slot without sticking out, it is not very easy to remove. However, that's how it is intentionally designed.As our intention was to use it as a built-in permanent external storage device, it does not need to be removed and we would not want it to be loose and fall out or sticking out a bit for easy grabbing.

Spotted this on Macrumors news feed a few weeks ago and couldn't believe my luck.I have a 256Gb SSD in my MBA, but I filled it about 6 months ago and was already using a 64Gb card in the SD card slot for extra storage, which obviously sticks out and is prone to damage from knocks.When installed, the JetDrive sits almost perfectly flush - just about 1mm proud of the case - enough to get a fingernail under each side when you need to remove it - which is obviously a bit trickier than a normal SD card which you can grip easily. The Acme sleeve I keep my MBA in is tight fitting, but it never catches on it.I have my iTunes library (around 50Gb) on it like other reviewers here, but I also have my Windows XP disk image for VMWare Fusion (around 30Gb). Brilliant to be able to keep it separate from my main hard drive.If you use a Windows disk image with Fusion or Parallels regularly, this is a great place to keep it.Any downsides? Well, you do lose your SD card slot! So if you regularly use SD cards for photo / digital video imports, this might be an annoyance, because as mentioned above, it is a lot trickier to remove the flush JetDrive from the slot compared to a normal SD card. The easiest solution I found is if you have a later MBA with USB3 ports, just get a USB SD card adaptor - under £10 to buy, saves unplugging the JetDrive every time and transfers are nearly as fast - job done.

After I'd just received my new JetDrive Lite 130, I was happy to see 128GB available on the empty card. However, I copied 16GB of files to it and the Finder told me only 89.3GB was available.That's 39GB less space for 16GB of usage! The folder itself showed 16m bytes and 25GB on disk, whereas on my ssd, it showed 16m bytes and 16GB on disk.The SD Association (of which Transcend are a member) cite performance impacts as a reason against using standard drive formatters.However, they have a formatter available for download at https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4.On Mavericks, I reformatted my drive using this utility and recopied my files.The results were as follows:A single file 14.57GB took 4 minutes to copy. This is the exactly as advertised 60MB/s write speed.80k files (16GB), however took 92 minutes to copy. which reflects about 5MB/s.In both cases, however, the info window was as expected showing a reasonable amount of memory usage and memory remaining. So, this solved my original problem.As a comparison, I decided to reformat as a Journaled and found the following:14.57GB file took 10 minutes to copy, which is only about 50% of the advertised max speed.80k files (16GB) more importantly took only 10.5 minutes.For me, sticking with a Journaled format is a no brainer, particularly if writing lots of small files, which I will be. It also may allow me include this on a Fusion drive, although I haven't investigated this yet.TL;DR - It is probably best to reformat to a Journaled partition as it provides a more consistent write speed of about 30MB/s, no matter the file sizes. ExFAT ranged between 5 to 60 MB/s speeds, depending on the number of files being written (lower number is faster).