I hear variations of “How can I get more storage space on my MacBook Air?” and “I’m out of space on my MacBook Pro Retina” all the time. Until recently, all we could do was delete files from the drive to free up space. Now, however, we have options.
Option number 1: Transcend JetDrive Lite
Many MacBook Airs and all Retina MacBook Pros come with an SDXC card slot on the side. It’s there so you can take the card out of your camera and stick it right into the laptop to transfer photos to the Mac. It turns out that hardly anyone uses that slot, so it’s just sitting there doing nothing… until now. Transcend manufactures a product called JetDrive Lite in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB sizes, and all you have to do is insert it into the unused SDXC card slot, instantly increasing the machine’s storage capacity.
The JetDrive Lite is designed to fit absolutely flush with your laptop instead of sticking out a bit like a regular SDXC card would, and since various models of Apple laptops use different SDXC slots, it’s important to get the card made. for your machine. That’s not hard: just go to the Apple menu, then About This Mac, then More Info. There you will see the official name of your model.
Armed with the model number, visit the Transcend website and choose the right model for your laptop. They have JetDrive Lites for MacBook Airs from 2010 to 2015 and MacBook Pro Retinas from 2012 to 2015. That covers it all!
Note: the space provided by the JetDrive Lite is separated of the space on the original Solid State Drive (SSD). So if you have a 256 GB SSD and add a 128 JetDrive Lite, whose end up with a 384 GB drive. Instead, you will have a second hard drive (128 GB) in addition to its original 256.
Remember: dragging a file from one disk to another is not move is — rather, is duplicates that. So when you drag items onto your JetDrive Lite card, remember to remove them from their original locations (unless you to wish duplicates).
Thrill-seeking power users can back up their entire hard drives and then use Disk Utility to create a single partition from the combined internal drive and JetDrive Lite, and then copy everything over again, but this does make it impossible to use the SDXC slot for anything. otherwise, that card must remain in place if the machine is to function properly.
My recommendation: save the card as a separate disk. That way you can still pull out the card and use the slot to import images from a camera if you ever feel like doing so. Also, the card is slower than the SSD, so it makes sense to put rarely used files on the card, leaving system, application, and frequently used files on the SSD.
Option number 2: Transcend JetDrive
The very easy way to upgrade storage on MacBook Pro Retina and MacBook Air is to insert a card into the SDXC slot. That was the “JetDrive Lite” described above. The less easy way, but perhaps better for you in the long run, is to take out the original too-small SSD and replace it with something bigger, namely the “JetDrive” (without the “Lite”). This requires opening the case, but that’s not that difficult, and Transcend has a great video showing how it’s done.
JetDrive comes in 240GB, 480GB, and 960GB models, and as with the Lite cards, you have to get the right one. Use the Transcend website to find out which one is right for your machine
Bonuses: Transcend includes an enclosure for your old SSD, so you end up with the new, larger SSD inside the laptop and your old, smaller SSD in an enclosure that you can use as an external hard drive. Pretty.
Longtime Mac hardware company Other World Computing has an internal SSD upgrade for the late 2013, 2014, and 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina display. This is the first update available for those machines. Find otherworldly computing online at http://macsales.com. Find the Transcend website at http://www.transcend-info.com/apple/jetdrivelite/.