The problem with Apple’s latest MacBook Pros is that upgrades are getting tougher and tougher to implement. All sacrificed for slimness, which includes soldered on RAM and smaller SSD’s. Now thanks to the falling ringgit, prices of the laptops are sky rocketing hence most people normally get the lowest specced ones.
Like me. I took the lowest specced retina Macbook Pro 13″ and it came with 128Gb of storage space. After the latest activity at Maybank Fintech, I had to do a quick edit of all of the videos and after editing 5-6 videos I hit an error saying that I ran out of space.
I always remembered that Transcend had an option to expand our storage via the SD card slot on the Macs but the problem is finding it available at local stores. A search through the Lowyat forums is that All IT Hypermart do sell them but they constantly have low stock.
Today was the day that I was at All IT and found one available for my Mac! Please be aware that the Transcend JetDrive Lite have various models for various Macbook Pros. As each MBP has different sizes, hence they also have various sizes to ensure that it stays flush.
The item is very small and I am glad that they had the 128Gb version in stock. For the retina MacBook Pro 13″, it is the JetDrive Lite 330.
Just slot it into the SD Card drive and you are ready to go!
After inserting it completely, it isn’t 100% flushed with the Mac, otherwise you would have an issue pulling it out. Now I am glad that I don’t have to worry too much about running out of space.
Overtime as I used it, I realised a couple of pointers.
- It is great as a simple storage as it’s transfer speeds are around 90mb/secs which is about 1/5 the speed of the SSD on the Mac
- Editing videos with files directly from the JetDrive was excruciatingly slow
- Editing photos with files directly from the JetDrive was equally excruciating
In conclusion, keep it as a place to store media and whenever you want to archive files, just move it there. Working files should be kept on your Mac’s SSD.
