1 Shares MacBooks are spectacular laptops. Most people will swear by them and love the way the work and the design they present. However, one complaint you will often hear surrounding these things is that, well, Apple can be a little stingy with the space, and most external storage solutions are ever so slightly inelegant.

Fortunately, everyone’s favorite Chinese company has a solution. Micro Size, Mega Storage Traditional SD cards pretty much just hang out of your MacBook like a wart, so Brando actually had a fairly brilliant idea; create a micro SD card reader that easily slots into the port and blends in with the MacBook’s case. Just slot in a micro SD card, slip it into the slot, and you’ve got a seamless expansion. Well, not quite seamless; there’s a small ledge for you to hook your fingernail onto in case you need to pull out the card for whatever reason.

But you can essentially leave a lot of storage installed in your MacBook, and swapped out at a moment’s notice. That’s a relief for MacBook users who need more space, sometimes a lot more, and it happens to be cheap, as well. Brando, being Brando, offers this little device for just $10, which is probably the cheapest accessory you’ll get for an Apple product. And hey, it looks good, which is just as welcome. Gadget Review works with a variety of advertisers to help monetize the site’s traffic.

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All Flash Storage Until gains traction in the market, SSDs with a custom physical design are going to be the norm in any system that aggressively prioritizes form factor. There has been at least some standardization within the Apple camp this past year. The 2012 iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pros all use the same custom SATA+power connector on their SSDs. The standard 2012 MacBook Pro still uses a 2.5' SATA SSD as it needs to easily swap positions with a mechanical hard drive depending on what the customer orders. The 13-inch rMBP goes one step further and uses the same physical SSD module that Apple uses in the 15-inch model. In the past Apple has used Samsung PM830 based SSDs for any drives larger than 128GB (so 256GB, 512GB and 768GB), which meant all of the 15-inch rMBPs got Samsung drives.

Vlc media player. Adobe acrobat x pro for mac. The 13-inch rMBP starts at 128GB however, which means there could be a chance you'll end up with a. Depending on your usage model (e.g. If you're going to enable FileVault), this could be undesirable. So far, all of the 128GB 13-inch rMBPs I've encountered use Samsung based drives.

As always, the easiest way to tell who makes the controller on your drive is to run a system report and look at the prefix on the drive itself: SM for Samsung and TS for Toshiba. Performance of the PM830 based solution is quite good: As expected, you get the same performance from the storage solution in the 13-inch rMBP as you would from the 15-inch model. Samsung's PM830 was the controller of choice when the 15-inch rMBP hit, however now there are some interesting options available on the market. Samsung's latest MDX controller, used in the 840 Pro, will likely make its way to Apple's lineup next year. However provides a new optimization point for SSDs.