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Drive Adapters Galore—Which Is The Right One?

I think that by now, we’ve established just how amazing our line of Solid State Drives are – from in-house benchmarking to glowing reviews and even the amazing response to our firmware updater tool all indicate just how popular and reliable our SSDs are.

In fact, the only reason they’re not even more popular is their form factor. Since the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 3GMercury Electra 6G and Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G all have the same 2.5″ form factor commonly found in laptops, many people assume that they won’t work in machines that use the larger 3.5″ drives.

Fortunately, that’s not quite true. While these drives don’t “naturally” fit in a 3.5″ drive bay, they work wonderfully when installed with the use of an adapter. That, of course, is where things may get a little confusing.

You know that phrase about there being “more than one way to skin a cat”? It applies to adapting a 2.5″ drive to fit a larger bay, too.

In fact, between OWC and NewerTech, we’ve got five different ways to adapt our SSDs for a larger drive bay. Which one is the “right” one? It all depends on what you’re adapting your drive for.

OWC Data Doubler

This is arguably our most popular drive mount. The OWC Data Doubler allows you to replace the SATA optical drive found in many popular laptops with a 2.5″ hard drive or SSD.

While, technically, you lose the built-in optical drive with this adapter installed, we also offer the SuperSlim drive enclosure that you can put your removed optical drive in, allowing you to use it externally.

Use if: You have a laptop with a 9.5mm slot-loading SATA optical drive that you want to replace with a 2.5″ drive.

OWC Mount Pro

The Mac Pro mounts its hard drives in a novel way – upside down, by the bottom mounting pins and plugged directly into the logic board. How do they get the drive to sit in the right spot? With a mounting sled.

The OWC Mount Pro aligns your OWC Mercury SSD (or any 2.5″ SATA drive) so that the SATA power and data connectors line up with the connections on the Mac Pro’s logic board.

Use if: You have a 2009 or 2010 Mac Pro (the drive sled is slightly different for earlier models) and want to install an SSD in one of the four hard drive bays.

OWC 2.5″ to 3.5″ Drive Adapter Bracket

While the Mac Pro is unusual in that it inverts the drive from a custom bracket, many RAID enclosures and computer cases connect the drive either directly to connectors on the logic board or via extremely short cables, so the SATA connectors need to be positioned in just the right spot.

The OWC 2.5″ to 3.5″ Drive Adapter Bracket positions the drive so that the SATA power and data connectors of the drive and side mounting holes of the bracket are oriented just as they would be on a 3.5″ drive, allowing you to use your OWC SSD just like you would a standard 3.5″ hard drive.

Use if: You want to install a 2.5” drive in a Mac, PC or drive enclosure that normally takes 3.5″ drives and holds the drives from the side.

NewerTech AdaptaDrive

On first glance, this would seem to have pretty much the same functionality as the OWC 2.5″ to  3.5″ adapter above. The truth is, that’s not far off. However, there are a couple of  differences with the NewerTech AdaptaDrive that differentiates it from the OWC solution.

First, the AdaptaDrive has both sets of mounting holes: sides and bottom. This allows you to use the AdaptaDrive for installations where you attach the drive via the bottom screws, such as in the Mac Pro. Second, the AdaptaDrive’s design allows for much less “flex” when mounting via the side holes – making them especially nice for enclosures with removable, side-mounted sleds, such as the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2.

Use if: You need to mount from bottom of drive, such as in a Mac Pro or you want a more “rigid” side mount.

OWC Multi-Mount

The OWC Multi-Mount comes in a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter and 3.5″ to 5.25″ adapter sizes. As you may have surmised, combining the two together allows you to mount a 2.5″ drive in a 5.25″ bay.

You can even use the Multi-Mount to install two drives in a single bay, if at least one of the drives is a 2.5″ with a 3.5″ adapter. With that setup, though, you’ll probably also need a PCIe SATA controller to add enough SATA ports.

Use if: you are installing a 3.5″ and/or a 2.5″ drive into a 5.25″ bay.

As you can see, we have an adapter for just about every situation. It just goes to show you that not only does OWC offer the best Solid State Drives available, but we also make it easy to install them in a wide variety of applications.

 

M. Chris Stevens
the authorOWC Chris S.
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2 Comments

  • hi, i bought OWC
    Mercury Electra 6G 120gb, and i don’t get full performance like Read: 208MB/s
    Write: 235MB/s. why is that? i installed instead of my had on MBP 2011 16 inch?

    • The numbers you are getting are consistent with incompressible data read/write speeds for that drive. Sounds like you’re using BlackMagic Design’s Disk Speed Test to obtain your read/write data which uses only incompressible data.