TarDisk Pear
A DO-IT-YOURSELF FUSION-DRIVE FOR YOUR MACBOOK.
THE TARDISK IS one of the more unique options for expanding laptop storage you’ll find — it’s only available for MacBooks (and then, only Pro and Air models from the last five years or so) and isn’t exactly cheap, at US$149 for 128GB or US$399 for the 256GB option. For that price, though, you do get a seamlessly-integrated extra bit of disk-based storage.
The TarDisk is basically a metal SD card using MLC NAND flash memory (like mainstream SSDs) and it’s deliberately short, so when you insert it into your MacBook’s card slot, there’s nothing poking out — except the ‘lip’ that lets you pull the TarDisk out, if desired. The idea, however, is that you won’t ever remove it, as by running the included Pear utility, the storage on the TarDisk is actually merged with your Mac’s main drive, basically giving you a DIY Fusion drive that’s one seamless, single volume.
We tested the TarDisk in our 13-inch MacBook Air (mid-2013 model). On its own (prior to ‘Pearing’), it provided read and write speeds of 91MB/s and 60MB/s, respectively, and for comparison, the internal SSD gave us 570MB/s reads and 389MB/s writes. The Pear process is super straightforward — essentially, you just run an app, reboot and your main drive is magically expanded and, moreover, after the fact our drive performance actually dramatically increased to 714MB/s read and 609MB/s writes. There’s some software-based caching going on here (and the TarDisk site is clear on that), but the pertinent part is that there was no decrease in general OS performance. If anything, things subjectively seemed a little faster.
The most significant caveat with the TarDisk is that removing the drive software is fiddly, and you’ll need to restore from a Time Machine backup after doing so.
Still, we’d call that a win overall, so if your MacBook’s low on storage and you’re willing to pay a premium for more (and, moreover, can stand to give up access to your SD card slot) then this unique solution works completely as advertised.