If we look on the Apple website, it appears that upgrade prices may be reasonable as the difference when choosing a 128GB system rather than 64GB is only $100, 256GB rather than 128GB is $300 and 512GB over 256GB is $500.

Pricing is also an important factor to consider and the OWC Aura Pro is available at prices of $167.99 (120GB), $224.99 (180GB), $319.99 (240GB) and $644.99 (480GB) at OWC. Even comparing the Aura Pro to the Toshiba Apple TS128E SSD which is also ‘LSI SandForce Driven’, the Aura Pro had no problem showing its colors as the best performing SSD on the market for the 2012 MBA. A straightforward comparison against the stock Samsung Apple SM256E SSD shows that, although the Samsung may be faster when transferring incompressible data at high sequential levels, the OWC Aura Pro walked away with every other performance comparison thrown at it. Though OWC doesn’t go into it on the Envoy Pro FX’s web page, USB Gen 2 10Gbps performance is about half the advertised 2GBps you’ll see over Thunderbolt 3. Those are the numbers you’ll see from synthetic benchmarks such as Blackmagicdesign’s Disk Speed Test and CrystalDiskMark 6 which we ran on sister publication PCWorld’s test bed to corroborate results.Perhaps the thing that astounded us the most, with respect to the OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express 6G 240GB SSD, was the fact that it’s performance of 91,273 IOPS was the highest we have ever achieved from a typical SSD. You might want to copy the software to your main drive so you can delete the helper partition and use the full capacity. The software will help you format the main partition to the file system of your choice, or you can do that yourself using Apple’s Disk Utility. The drive ships with helper software installed on an 8GB partition. (Note that sustained write performance with larger files often drops significantly with lower capacity drives.) OWC includes both a Thunderbolt 3 cable and USB Type-C to Type-C cable with a captive Type-C to Type-A adapter. The Envoy Pro FX uses an NVMe OWC Aura Pro internally and is available in 240GB, 480GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities for $179, $229, $319, and $499 respectively. The company includes teh necessary cables as well. OWC labels for both the supported transfer protocols.

Owc aura pro ssd review