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Make sure your data is safe for World Backup Day!

Thursday, March 31st, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

It’s probably pretty safe to say that we here at OWC are pretty enthusiastic about backing up. Nothing can wreak more havoc on your stress levels than discovering that your irreplaceable data has disappeared forever due to a hardware or software failure. While the adage “There are two kinds of people with hard drives: those who have had a failure and those who will,” still rings true, the trick is to be prepared and that’s something we’ve promoted heavily over the years.

That’s why we were surprised when we heard about World Backup Day; we’re not above celebrating somewhat off-beat “holidays” here at OWC, but this event promoting something we wholeheartedly believe in somehow escaped our attention.

Well, we are no longer remiss observing this movement, and we’re not the only ones. The folks over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) are holding a contest today, March 31, in observance of World Backup Day and we’re helping out by furnishing a couple of NewerTech StoraDrive cases, a couple of Voyager S3 drive docks and a 1.0TB Mercury Elite-AL Pro Storage Solution as prizes. After all, if you’re going to back up, you better have the gear needed for such a purpose.

So head on over to TUAW and enter the contest…that link and the first giveaway is scheduled to go live between 11:00-11:30AM ET. We hope you win. But even if you don’t, though, you can’t lose by celebrating World Backup Day – today and every day!

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics
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NewerTech Debuts StoraDrive Media Storage Tray For Organizing Up to Thirteen Pieces of Digital Media

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Newer Technology, Inc. announced today that it has expanded its hard drive accessory line with the introduction of the new  Media Storage Tray for use with the NewerTech StoraDrive™. The Media Storage Tray transforms one of the stackable anti-static StoraDrive cases into a compartmentalized, padded, all-in-one storage solution for protecting and organizing multiple digital media formats.

Holds Up To Thirteen Pieces of Digital Media In Multiple Formats:

Each NewerTech Media Storage Tray can hold:

  • One 2.5″ PATA/SATA Hard Drive or Solid State Drive
  • Up to two Compact Flash cards
  • Up to two Sony Memory Sticks
  • Up to four SmartMedia cards
  • Up to four SD (Secure Digital), SDHC (Secure Digital High-Capacity), or SDXC (Secure Digital eXtended-Capacity) cards Article Continues…
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Category: New @ OWC, Press Releases
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10.6.7 and Open Type Fonts – A Dangerous Combination

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

“What do you get when you cross a font geek and the latest Snow Leopard update?” It sounds like the beginning of a really lame joke, but it’s exactly what some of us went through last week after applying the 10.6.7 Software Update.

Apple’s forums are filled with threads like this one about people having problems with various applications, most notably Adobe apps and PDF production, though it was noted to pop up in other places as well. It seems that it’s somehow tied to OpenType fonts and Apple’s implementation of the PostScript rendering engine.

With my affinity for type, it was surprising that I didn’t notice this right away. It was even more surprising how I came across the error. Apparently, font rendering in Motion (and, by extension, Final Cut Pro) is handled in a similar way as printing, so as I was rendering out one of our instructional videos, the text fields came out with missing letters.

After some reading about other people’s problems, I conducted a few very informal tests and came to the conclusion that the problem had to be in Apple’s rendering engines; non-Apple apps I tried had no problems printing. However, as the font we use in our videos is an OpenType font, and we use Final Cut (an Apple application) for editing/rendering, we still needed a solution. Unfortunately, the only effective solution we could find was to go back to 10.6.6. Article Continues…

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Category: Tech Tips
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We’re so dedicated, even our shipments try their hardest.

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 | Author: OWC Chelsea

In the three years that I have been an OWC Customer Service Representative, I have seen many… unusual… situations. I’ve heard about things like dogs eating hard drives, ex-spouses holding packages hostage and people backing their cars over their computers in the driveway. Nothing really shocks me anymore.

I got a call the other day from a gentleman that lives in Michigan and he started the conversation by saying, “Are you sitting down? I have something shocking to tell you.”

When a conversation begins like this, you never really know what you’re going to get. Considering all I’ve heard, however, I was expecting a good story, but likely nothing I hadn’t heard before.

Then the customer said, “I received an order today… from 2009. The mailman just dropped it off.” Okay… that was something I hadn’t heard before and the customer was right—I was shocked by this!

Two years ago—almost to the date—we shipped his order… and it didn’t arrive. After he contacted us, we shipped him out a new order and marked this one off as being a casualty of the postal service. It’s unfortunate, but the occasional lost package is just part of the online shopping experience; it’s is also why we’re prepared to offer options for customers dealing with lost packages.

Two years later, the original package arrives at the customer’s door. Where had it been? What took it so long? I spent the rest of the day (between calls, of course) making up ridiculous back-stories on where this lonely little package has been and its journey to the customer.

The moral of the story is if you ever think that your shipment may be lost, it might be and OWC will be glad to work with you to get it resolved. On the other hand, it may just be running very, very late.

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics
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Mercury Extreme SSD makes fast new MBP even faster!

Monday, March 28th, 2011 | Author: Guest Blogger

by Peter Schmalfeldt – Satisfied OWC Customer

I got my new 17” MacBook Pro the other day, but before it even hit my doorstep, I already had plans for some surgery. I wanted to swap out the Solid State Drive (SSD) that came with the MacBook Pro (a Toshiba drive provided by Apple) with a better performing & more stable OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD.

Before I swapped anything out, I performed some benchmarking tests and also timed how long it took to boot up the computer and get to a desktop. The second test took 33.7 seconds from the time I pressed the power button until the desktop finished loading.

That’s pretty fast, but I think we can do better…

So, I took it apart to put in the new OWC SSD. I installed it using an OWC Data Doubler, which lets me put a second drive in the optical drive bay. Then, after formatting both drives and re-installing the OS onto my new OWC drive, I turned it on. With the laptop off, pressing the power button and getting to a finished desktop took 21.8 seconds. That shaved about 12 seconds—or about 35%—off the old boot time!

Also, for the sake of science, I ran the Geekbench testing suite before and after the install, and posted the results. The first listing with 10537 is the most recent test with new drive; 10516 was the score with the original drive.

To me, it’s pretty clear that this OWC Mercury SSD smokes the Apple Toshiba SSD that ships with the MacBook Pros that have them installed.

This post has 26 comments.
Category: Product Spotlight, Random Thoughts & Topics
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OWC Supports “The Last Shuttle” Project

Friday, March 25th, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

In case you haven’t been following up on these sorts of things: the date of the final Space Shuttle launch is rapidly approaching.

For the last 30 years, the Space Shuttle has served to carry numerous satellites and payloads into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), perform emergency repairs, perform scientific experiments in microgravity environments, and transport personnel to and from the International Space Station.

After June 28, there will be no further Shuttle missions. The Constellation program was scheduled to replace the Shuttle, with a focus not only on missions in LEO but also on a return to the Moon. Unfortunately, that program got scrapped early last year and there is little left to replace it. There are programs, such as the Shuttle-Derived Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle that propose to take up much of the slack of both the Shuttle and Constellation, but they are still many years off. In the meantime, the USA is going to have to depend on other countries and private corporations for its manned space needs.

While the Shuttle may be going away, there’s at least one group of people out there trying to preserve the Shuttle’s legacy for generations to come.

“The Last Shuttle” Project is a group of professional photographers and cinematographers who have come together to chronicle the last mission of the Shuttle Program. They have unprecedented access “behind the scenes” to show exactly what’s involved in a Shuttle mission from beginning to end. Their focus is on telling the story of the Space Shuttle program, including behind the scenes activities and the people, from plumbers to astronauts, who were involved in making it happen. Article Continues…

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Category: OWC Unplugged
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OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE Solid State Drive Used To Set Overclocking World Record

Thursday, March 24th, 2011 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Other World Computing today announced its OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE Solid State Drive was an integral component of a test rig that established a world record in the PCMark Vantage overall point category for a Quad Core system. The SSD Review HWBot Overclocking team, headed by Paul Alcorn, a storage specialist and overclocker who specializes in RAID/SSD performance benchmarking, eclipsed the former world record of 33271 points with a first submission high score of 34311.0 marks.

What It Takes To Set A Record

Approximately 30,452 competitors compete over a wide range of benchmarks in an ‘overclockers league’ maintained by HWBot.org. Millions of benchmarks have been run and submitted to Futuremark databases, a central verification system. Once the results are verified with Futuremark, an ‘overclocker’ is able to submit to HWBot.org.

“We chose the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD for our world record attempt because its 28% over provisioning ensures much better performance over many runs Article Continues…

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Category: Benchmarking/Performance, Press Releases, Product Spotlight
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Happy Birthday OS X!

Thursday, March 24th, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Long-time Mac users may remember that Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) was released on this date in 2001, making today OS X’s tenth (or is that Xth?) birthday.

While preceded by OS X Server 1.0 and the OS X Public Beta, Cheetah was the first official release of Apple’s UNIX-based software. Unfortunately, by the judgment of many, it really wasn’t “ready for prime-time.” It was slower than OS 9, lacked features like CD burning and DVD playback, and had very few software titles that ran natively on it.

These problems would be addressed in OS X 10.1 (Puma), which was released as a free update to owners of Cheetah, though you had to go to an Apple Store and get a burned copy, or send $20 to Apple to get one via mail. Numerous other updates, like a movable Dock, better 3D performance, drivers for third-party peripherals, and network integration were all included.

OS X 10.2 became the first OS X version to be officially referred to by its code name, Jaguar. It featured Quartz Extreme, which leveraged the video cards in the current batch of Macs for improved graphics performance. A host of new applications, including iChat, and additions, such as Bluetooth support and Rendezvous (later renamed “Bonjour”) Networking rounded out the list of new improvements.

In 2003, we got our hands on OS X 10.3 (Panther). This version introduced many new features, including Exposé for window management and Font Book for font management. Fast User Switching facilitated the use of multiple accounts on the same computer without requiring users to log out first, and XCode was introduced as the new development tool for OS X applications.

Article Continues…

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Category: Random Thoughts & Topics
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