The MacBook Air mid 2012 is still a very capable notebook for everyday use. When my wife ordered one in 2012, we thought that a 120GB SSD would suffice, but times have changed and so has the size of IE. digital photo’s. Time to upgrade the SSD!

I got my hands on a brand new WD Blue M.2 SSD 250GB, so I decided to use that one. Now you can’t fit a M.2 SSD in a mid 2012 MacBook Air, but there is a company called Sintech that is creating all kinds of SSD adapters. I ordered a MBA 2012 to M.2 SSD adapter from Amazon and a week or so later it fell on my doormat.

Installing the Western Digital Blue M.2 SSD on te adapter was a bit of a fiddle with what screw to use, but I got it mounted just fine. Luckily iFixit has a full tutorial on how to swap the SSD (not that it is hard), so I followed their procedure and installed the SSD in the MacBook Air.

Obviously I  had to reinstall MacOs, but that was easy because created a MacOS installer USB Drive before I started and had a good Time Machine backup at hand which I made on a fast G-Drive EV.

After installing and restoring 155GB of free space again 😀

Free space! At last!

The MacBook Air 2012 isn’t capable to make full use of the speed of the WD M.2 SSD (it should reach speeds of up to 545MB/sec), but it gave me a much better write speed. Reading was a little bit slower than on the original SSD but personally I think that’s fine.