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Review – Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD in MacBook Pro

Monday, February 6th, 2012 | Author: Guest Blogger

by Gerd N., OWC Customer

There are very compelling reasons to upgrade your current MacBook Pro. While my MacBook Pro is still a 2011 model with 8GB of RAM, I always felt that it could be a bit faster. Even with the 7200RPM Toshiba drive fitted, IO operations felt sluggish (even more so after installing the OWC) and I wanted to see if a SSD would make a big difference.

The 30-day return promise from OWC made the choice of the Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD 480 GB drive an easy choice. When it comes to SSD options, not many companies provide reasonable pricing like OWC, let alone a 5 year warranty on their products – pricing is steep at USD 1,000.00 but the results are overwhelming and worth it.

My MacBook Pro supports 6Gb/s SATA out of the box, and although the System Profiler does not show TRIM support, this is not an issue, as the OWC SSDs have TRIM support built-in.

Installation of the drive is as simple as Article Continues…

OWC Highlights Depth and Breadth of Highly Rated Mercury SSD Line at CES

Sunday, January 8th, 2012 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Committed to leading the personal, SMB, and Enterprise Solid State Drive (SSD) industry, Other World Computing announced today that it will highlight its broad line of award-winning SSDs in its booth #5231 in the LVCC North Hall during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week. The line includes a new consumer/prosumer notebook SSD and a new SMB/Enterprise SSD announced in separate CES press releases. With SSDs for nearly every Mac and PC produced during the past decade, OWC is the most comprehensive US manufacturer of industry leading SandForce processor-based SSDs available today.

SSD Popularity Soaring

iSuppli expects 2011 SSD revenue to hit $4.4 billion—up 91 percent from $2.3 billion in 2010. By 2014, iSuppli expects SSD revenue to reach $7 billion. 2011 SSD shipments are projected to reach approximately 15 million units, compared to 6.9 million in 2010.

Key reasons for the growing popularity of SSDs include speed—they’re faster than any hard drive; there are no moving parts to fail and they offer a more reliable computing experience than hard disk drives (HDDs). OWC has taken these benefits a step further by enhancing its Customer Value Proposition. Article Continues…

Category: Press Releases

OWC Announces Mercury EXTREME Pro 3G As Lowest Cost Of Entry In Award-Winning, Solid-State Drive Line

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

Other World Computing announced today the addition of its lowest-cost- of-entry Solid-State Drive to its award-winning SSD line.  The new OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 3G SSD combines award-winning SandForce technologies and Tier 1/Grade A NAND to deliver data rates over 275MB/s in a noiseless, more reliable form factor over conventional magnetic hard disk drives. Designed and manufactured in the U.S. with imported parts, the new OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 3G 30GB SSD’s $67.99 MSRP makes it one of the lowest-priced, high-performance SSDs on the market. Article Continues…

Category: Press Releases

Drive Adapters Galore—Which Is The Right One?

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

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 Article Continues…

OWC Upgrade Service For All Mid-2011 Apple iMacs Now Offers $249 Solid State Drive Option With Over 2x Faster Performance Than Factory SSD Options

Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Other World Computing announced today a lower starting cost for installation of a 6Gb/s SSD via the OWC Turnkey Upgrade Installation Program for the Mid-2011 Apple iMac. Starting from less than half the cost of factory SSD options, the OWC program gives mid-2011 iMac owners/buyers the option of having OWC install up to three award winning, SandForce Driven OWC Mercury 6G Solid State Drives up to 480GB each and with data rates over 2x faster than factory SSD options. Program options also include a larger capacity hard drive up to 3.0TB and certified Memory Upgrades up to 32GB. 27″ iMac owners also have the option of OWC installing the industry’s only eSATA interface and experience data transfer rates up to 600MB/s. OWC’s installation service program offers multiple configuration options starting at $169 with a 48 business hours or less installation turnaround. Article Continues…

Category: Press Releases

OWC Introduces First ‘Apple/Mac Friendly’ Firmware Update Solution For SandForce Driven Solid State Drives

Thursday, September 1st, 2011 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Other World Computing announced today the industry’s first and only Apple/Mac compatible firmware updater for SandForce Driven Solid State Drives. The fully Mac bootable updater is freely available from OWC for use exclusively with select OWC Mercury Solid State Drive models manufactured since January 2010. This new Mac compatible firmware updater is in addition to firmware update support OWC previously made available for Macintosh computers via the use of Bootcamp, as well as for PCs running the Windows OS. Article Continues…

OWC Announces Upgrade Service For All Mid-2011 Apple iMacs Featuring Up To Three High Performance 6Gb/s Solid State Drives, 3.0TB Hard Drive, 32GB RAM And/Or Industry’s Only eSATA Interface For 27″ Models

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Other World Computing announced today its OWC Turnkey Upgrade Installation Program for the Mid-2011 Apple iMac that enables any 2011 21.5″ or 27″ iMac model owner to have OWC professionally install up to three award winning OWC Mercury 6G Solid State Drives up to 480GB each, a larger capacity hard drive up to 3.0TB, and OWC Memory Upgrades up to 32GB. 27″ iMac owners also have the option of OWC installing the industry’s only eSATA interface and experience data transfer rates up to 600MB/s. OWC’s installation service program offers multiple configuration options starting at $169 with a 48 business hours or less installation turnaround. Article Continues…

OWC Turnkey Program for 2011 iMacs Announced.

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011 | Author: OWC Grant

You know that feeling of accomplishment when you’ve overcome a huge obstacle and you can’t wait to tell the entire world about it? Well, we’ve got it; we’ve overcome the whole “fan/drive sensor” problem found when installing a non-factory drive in the 2011 iMacs. That means we can now officially announce the OWC Turnkey Program for the 2011 iMacs.

We’re also going to one-up the 2010 program by including upgrade options for both the 21.5″ and the 27″ 2011 iMac models.

That drive sensor thing was a big hurdle. Apple uses a custom firmware that sends temperature info in a non-standard fashion. Unfortunately, unless the drive has this special firmware, the fans spin at full speed. We wanted a solution that would be a long-term solution that wasn’t dependent on a software patch or hack. Though those sorts of fixes can be temporarily effective, we didn’t want to rely on them for two reasons:

  1. they put overhead on the bus which can reduce performance
  2. a software solution can can fail or be rendered non-functional by a wide variety of actions (software updates, system reinstalls, etc.) which could risk the hard drive and the data contained on it.

So, we went another route and developed a hardware solution that interfaces accurately and properly with what can be viewed as a frustratingly unique temperature data monitoring method by Apple. While our solution adds a little bit to the cost of upgrading the iMac’s hard drives, we feel that cost is more than offset by the advantages it has over software solutions. Article Continues…