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OWC Customer Reviews his OWC-Upgraded iMac

Monday, September 19th, 2011 | Author: Guest Blogger

[Editor’s Note: Due to its very nature, it’s been somewhat difficult to get a professional media review of our Turnkey Upgrade Program for the 2011 iMac, so we’re posting a customer testimonial, instead. If you’re a reviewer and want to review the upgrade program, please contact us.]

Why I Chose the OWC Turnkey Upgrade Program for the 2011 iMac.

by Ken H., OWC Customer

In January, I had a 2TB OWC Mercury Elite Pro RAID hard drive that wouldn’t mount. Since none of the data on the drive was backed up, I started to look into data recovery and found out how expensive it was. Fortunately, OWC Tech Support helped me determine that that the problem was simply a power adapter problem and not a drive failure.

After coming so close to losing valuable data, I decided to come up with a backup plan. I bought a 12TB OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 and configured it as RAID 5. I also bought an empty Qx2 and placed the 2TB drives from two 4TB Mercury Elite Pro RAIDs into that for an 8TB RAID 0 drive. That way, I could put all of the videos and photos from several drives onto one large drive and keep a backup of the large drive.

Article Continues…

One Comment

Category: Product Spotlight

Tags: 2011, 3TB, eSATA, imac, memory, Mercury, OWC, Qx2, ram, SSD, Turnkey, upgrade

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…

This post has 20 comments.

Category: Press Releases

Tags: 2011, 3.0GB, 32GB, Electra, eSATA, external, extreme, hard drive, hdd, imac, install, memory, Other World Computing, OWC, press, ram, release, SSD, Turnkey, upgrade

More on the OWC SSD Updater

Friday, September 2nd, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

We’ve had a number of questions here on the blog and elsewhere regarding our updater. We figured it would be best to simply put it all in one post, to address their concerns, as well as provide a resource for those looking for this information in the future.

First things first, we’d like to note that only customers who purchased their OWC SSD before March 18th, 2011 have any reason to download the current update application. Drives purchased after that date already have the most recent firmware and there is no benefit of an update at this time. Having said that, it is important to know that if/when a firmware update is needed in future, we now have this Mac friendly updater application in addition to the Windows update application we also provide.

This just so happens to be the first Mac-compatible updater for SandForce Powered SSDs, namely OWC’s series of SandForce Powered drives. The bootable disc runs a Linux-based interface that has been customized for our application. It starts up automatically, you point, click, and done.

We truly wanted an updater for our SSDs that would be application specific, Mac friendly, and extremely stable and simple to use. As the screenshots below illustrate, we’ve managed to accomplish that quite well. Article Continues…

This post has 86 comments.

Category: New @ OWC, Product Spotlight, Tech Tips

Tags: 3G, Firmware, imac, Mac, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, Mercury Extreme Pro, OWC, SandForce, SSD, updater

Mac-Compatible SandForce Updater Now Available

Thursday, September 1st, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

We know you’ve been asking for it and we’ve been hard at work on it. Now, we can proudly say that OWC has the industry’s first (and only)Mac-compatible firmware updater for SandForce Driven Solid State Drives. It’s available for download from our site for use with select OWC Mercury SSDs manufactured after January 2010.

While we’ve offered firmware updates since Spring 2010 to recently, they’ve only been offered via a Windows-based uploader and required a Boot Camp installation to work properly with your Mac. Now, though, that dependency is gone. All you need to do is download the updater from our site, burn it to a DVD, and boot from that DVD to launch the point-and-click interface. Right now, this utility is only for our 3G SSDs which utilize the SF1200 series processor. We should have an updater for our Mercury 6G series (SF 2200 series processor) in a few weeks. Article Continues…

This post has 56 comments.

Category: New @ OWC, Product Spotlight, Tech Tips

Tags: 3G, Firmware, imac, Mac, Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, Mercury Extreme Pro, OWC, SandForce, SSD, updater

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…

This post has 18 comments.

Category: New @ OWC, Press Releases

Tags: 2011, 3.0GB, 32GB, Electra, eSATA, external, extreme, hard drive, hdd, imac, install, memory, Other World Computing, OWC, press, ram, release, SSD, Turnkey, upgrade

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:

they put overhead on the bus which can reduce performance
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…

This post has 48 comments.

Category: New @ OWC, Product Spotlight

Tags: 2011, 21, 21.5, 27, 27" iMac, aftermarket, Apple, eSATA, extreme, imac, mid 2010, mod, modification, optical, OWC, SSD, Turnkey, upgrade

OWC 8GB Memory Modules ‘Supercharge’ 2011 Apple MacBook Pro and Mac mini with 16GB RAM…Double The Factory Maximum Memory

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Other World Computing announced today that its in-house MaxRAM tested and verified compatible OWC DDR3 1333MHz 16GB Memory Upgrade Kit ‘supercharges’ 2011 Apple MacBook Pro and Mac mini models by doubling the Factory maximum offered memory. The OWC 16GB Memory Upgrade Kit, now priced at $929.99, joins existing popular OWC memory upgrade kits for MacBook Pro and Mac mini models including the 8GB Memory Upgrade Kit priced at $71.99, which offers savings up to 70% compared to the same sized Factory installed 8GB option. Article Continues…