How-to: replace your MacBook Air SSD with OWC's Aura Pro Express

The OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express SSD module is designed specifically for Apple's late-2010 MacBook Air models.

Apple launched updated MacBook Air models in October of 2010, featuring new, compact, and (originally) proprietary form-factor solid state drives (SSDs). The SSDs have so far only been available to OEMs directly from Toshiba, despite the fact that the SSD is the only user-replaceable part in the MacBook Air. It took a few months, but long-time Mac upgrade source Other World Computing stepped up to offer three upgrade options based on fast Sandforce controllers.
OWC's Mercury Aura Pro Express SSDs (say that three times fast) come in 180GB, 240GB, and 360GB capacities. So we installed a 240GB Mercury Aura Pro Express that the company lent us into an 11" MacBook Air in order to see how difficult the upgrade process is, and to put the drive through its paces and see what kind of performance gains are possible with the Sandforce-based design.

Installation: pentalobe driver included

As we said earlier, the SSD is pretty much the only user-serviceable part inside the latest MacBook Air. The battery can technically be swapped out too, but so far, the only parts are available directly from Apple, which means a trip to the Genius Bar. Everything else is soldered directly to the logic board, including the RAM.
The installation process for the drive itself is very straightforward: remove some screws, remove the bottom plate, take out the OEM SSD, swap in the OWC SSD, and put the bottom plate back on. Depending on your comfort level, you should be able to do it in 15-20 minutes.
The main hurdle with installation was that there were no external drive cases for the special small-outline SSD modules that Apple uses in the MacBook Air. With standard 2.5" notebook drives, you could put the original in an external case, install the replacement, and clone the external drive to the new drive. OWC told Ars that it plans to offer an external USB enclosure sometime soon, but until then, replacing the SSD means a full backup and restore to an external drive will be needed. It's not difficult at all, but it can be more time-consuming than one would hope.
We'll detail the process we used, noting a couple caveats along the way.

OWC includes the five-point "pentalobe" and six-point Torx drivers needed for installation.

First, you will need an OWC Aura Pro Express SSD drive, your MacBook Air, an external USB 2.0 backup drive, and pentalobe and T5 torx drivers (included with the Aura Pro Express). You'll also need some kind of backup software; we used Mike Bombich's excellent donationware app Carbon Copy Cloner.
We recommend an anti-static mat and/or grounding wrist strap if you have them—you can do without, but the usual warnings about static discharge ruining your sensitive electronics applies here. We also recommend using either loops of tape affixed to your work surface or a small magnetic strip to keep track of the 11 tiny screws you'll be removing.

A loop of electrical tape kept the tiny screws from the MacBook Air from being easily misplaced.

Step 1: Backup

First, you'll want to back up the data on your MacBook Air's current internal SSD. There are a couple different methods for backing up and restoring. You could make a Time Machine backup, use the recovery USB drive supplied with your Air to reinstall Mac OS X, and restore from Time Machine. You could also do a similar method with other backup products, but restoring from the backup might require installing additional software.

Cloning the MacBook Air's original SSD boot drive to a portable USB2 drive.

We used our usual method of creating a bootable backup using Carbon Copy Cloner. A portable 120GB USB2 Western Digital hard drive served our purposes here, as the stock 128GB SDD was only about half full. CCC created an exact copy of the Air's 61GB of data in about 54 minutes.