Solid State Drive upgrade options for the MacBook Pro with Retina Display have finally come down in price enough to make them a reasonably good value.  Here’s a performance comparison between the stock Apple drive and the OWC Aura Pro 6G:

According to Blackmagic, the OWC Aura Pro 6G 480GB meets the advertised specification, but the stock 256GB Apple/Samsung MZ-DPC2560/0A2 writes significantly faster. This snapshot was taken on a Mid-2012 MacBook Pro with Retina Display running a clean install of Yosemite 10.10.2.  In typical use, there isn’t much of a discernible difference in performance. The MacBook was no slouch to start with, so this upgrade was all about the extra storage space.

I’ll take OWC’s word that the need for TRIM has been obviated due to built-in garbage collection. There are several bad reviews of this drive on Amazon, but OWC has a 5-year warranty, and Time Machine works. With typical use, this drive should easily last 15 years  — longer than the useful life of a MacBook.

Update 2016:  With my own OWC SSD, there was no such luck.