Essential MacBook Air add-ons

The storage problem

Flash storage like the Air’s has its advantages: It has no moving parts, so it’s far more rugged than a traditional hard drive. It also offers better battery life and speed, especially in starting up and opening programs.

The downside is that flash storage is much more expensive than a hard drive, which is why you don’t get much storage on the MacBook Air. The base model comes with only 128 GB. You can pay several hundred dollars more to get 256 or 512 GB instead, but that’s still nothing like the 1 or 2 terabytes available on some laptops.

One quick, cheap, easy solution is this: The SanDisk Ultra Fit flash drive. It’s a tiny, tiny flash drive, so small that you can pop it into your Air’s USB jack and leave it there.You’ve got a second “hard drive” of 128 GB for only $30. (There are smaller ones, too, for as little as $10.)

The Transcend JetDrive Lite is a similar idea ($150 for 256 GB), except that it goes into your MacBook’s SD memory-card slot.

The Ultra Fit and JetDrive are great for offloading files you just want to carry with you, but they’re not fast enough to be a main “hard drive.” You wouldn’t want to use one as your video-editing “scratch drive,” for example.

That’s where the weird and wonderful TarDisk comes in. (The name sounds gooey and gross, although I guess it’s supposed to be a pun on the Tardis machine from “Doctor Who.”)

It’s way, way more expensive — $150 for 128 GB, and $300 for 256 GB — but it’s a whole different ballgame. It’s a tiny, finely crafted aluminum flash-memory drive that you insert into your Air’s SD memory-card slot. (It’s also available for the MacBook Pro.)