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Confirmed: OWC Aura Pro Faster Than Factory SSDs In 2012 MacBook Pro With Retina Display

Friday, March 1st, 2013 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Apple has started using either SanDisk or Samsung flash storage modules in their MacBook Pro with Retina display models and rob-ART morgan over at the Bare Feats lab posed the question of, “Which one is faster, the Samsung or SanDisk flash storage? And how do both compare to OWC’s Aura Pro 480G flash storage upgrade?”

And the overwhelming winner was the OWC Aura Pro which towered over both Apple offerings in random and sustained transfers.

 

For the results of all testing, see the original Bare Feats article: SHOOTOUT: Is the flash storage in the 2013 Retina MacBook Pro faster than the storage in the 2012 version?

 

Source

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Category: Benchmarking/Performance
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Boost 2011 MBP Performance with 1600MHz RAM

Monday, June 25th, 2012 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Right now, everybody’s talking about the MacBook Pros announced at WWDC earlier this month. That’s great; it’s always fun to talk about the latest and greatest. However, not everybody can afford to get the newest model every year. Most of us have to content ourselves with getting the most out of what we already have.

It’s in that line that we’ got some great info for those of you who bought a MacBook Pro last year. In an interesting development, it seems that although Apple sold and marketed the 2011 MacBook Pros as using 1333MHz memory, they are, in fact, capable of utilizing 1600MHz memory, just like the current crop of MacBook Pros.

Lloyd Chambers of Mac Performance Guide did some in-depth testing and found that a 2011 MacBook Pro with 1600MHz memory saw a 2% average performance boost over the same configuration with 1333MHz memory.

We’ve long established that adding more memory to your Mac is the most cost-effective way to get the most out of your Mac. For the 2011 MacBook Pros, it looks like using the faster compatible RAM speed can get you that extra little bit of speed you may be seeking.

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Category: Product Spotlight
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Thunderbolt Display – Data Transfer Speed Testing

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011 | Author: OWC Michael

We were pretty exited to receive our first few Thunderbolt Displays yesterday. If you want a closer look – we released some unboxing photos before we started our testing. We set off to see just how good essentially the world’s first Thunderbolt hub performs – not to mention the only way so far to add FireWire compatibility to your MacBook Air.

We’re pleased to announce that for read speeds across the board, whether plugging in via USB or FireWire 800, there is no speed degradation whatsoever.

With FireWire 800 write speeds though, we found an interesting anomaly.

When running a FireWire 800 external drive hooked up to the Thunderbolt display, there was roughly a 3-5MB/s slowdown in write speeds versus the same drive plugged in directly to the FireWire 800 port on the host machine. Admittedly, that 3-5MB/s is quantitatively not that large of a difference, but when the interface itself maxes out at roughly 80MB/s transfer speeds – that 3-5MB equates to a 4-7% total difference, which can seem significant. USB speeds remained constant and did not show any slowdown.

Here’s an example: Article Continues…

This post has 23 comments.
Category: Benchmarking/Performance, Product Spotlight
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2011 iMac Benchmark Testing With the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD

Thursday, May 5th, 2011 | Author: OWC Michael

What a whirlwind of information these new iMacs have been creating. Just a few hours after the machines were released, we had five out of the six base models unboxed and going through our gamut of tests.

We were shocked when we installed our new OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSDs only to find that Apple had essentially throttled the internal SATA connections on the latest Z68 chipset from Intel to 3Gb/s speeds when the Z68 chipset itself could accommodate up to two SATA Revision 3.0 (6Gb/s) ports and up to four SATA Revision 2.0 (3Gb/s) ports. News of this travesty rocked the Mac community - even one of our Twitter followers heard the news and tweeted Phil Schiller directly.

Shortly after the news spread far and wide, Apple released iMac EFI Update 1.6 and two SATA Revision 3.0 (6Gb/s) ports were available on the latest iMac and all was right in the world again.

We fired up the machines, installed the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD and started our testing again. As promised, here is a glimpse of our initial benchmark testing… Article Continues…

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Category: Benchmarking/Performance
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Testing: RAID 0 in a MacBook Pro using the Data Doubler.

Friday, April 29th, 2011 | Author: OWC Duane

Among the different configuration options available when using the OWC Data Doubler in your MacBook or MacBook Pro is setting both drives to function as a RAID 0 (striped) array. This combines both drives (the one in the Data Doubler equipped optical bay and the one in the original hard drive bay) into a single volume, which provides an increase in data access speed.

Since we’ve had several questions about this, we decided to put this configuration to the test by using different combinations of hard drives and SSDs to determine which offered the best balance of price, capacity and performance.

Our test machine was a 2011 13″ MacBook Pro (MacBookPro8,1) with a 2.3GHz Intel Core 5 processor and 4GB of RAM. Inside, we replaced the optical drive with an OWC Data Doubler to allow us to utilize a second drive.

Article Continues…

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Category: Benchmarking/Performance, Product Spotlight, Tech Tips
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