OWC Blog - blog.macsales.com

Tag-Archive for » state «

OWC Announces New Mercury Extreme Pro 40GB SSD As Most Affordable SandForce Processor Based Solid State Drive On Market

Friday, August 20th, 2010 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

Other World Computing announced today a new 40GB model to its award-winning OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD™ line as the most affordable high performance SandForce® Processor based Solid State Drive on the market. Designed and made in the U.S. from imported parts, the new OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 40GB SSD’s special introductory pricing of $99.99 makes it the lowest priced SSD on the market to offer three key high performance features:

  • Industry leading sustained Read AND Write speeds over 260MB/s (with peak speeds up to 285MB/s).
  • Best in class error correction (ECC) and SandForce RAISE™ redundancy with 7% over provisioning.
  • SandForce DuraClass™ technology with ultra-efficient Block Management & Wear Leveling for long term durability.

The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD line, which has won Editor’s choice awards and review comments like “Eye popping speed with consistent performance over time”, “Best write speeds we’ve seen”, and “The fastest SSD to hit our test bench yet” from leading performance testing sites like Tweaktown, Hot Hardware, MacPerformanceGuide, Maximum PC, Storage Review and Benchmark Reviews, is available for immediate ordering in nine configurations from 40GB to 480GB starting at $99.99. All models are Macintosh® and PC compatible and install easily into notebooks, as well as into desktops/towers with an OWC Multi-Mount adapter kit sold separately. Article Continues…

This post has 9 comments.
Category: Press Releases
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Mercury Extreme SSD Trouncing Competition in “The Real World.”

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 | Author: OWC NewsFeed

While we’re not quite sure how well it’d do on an MTV reality series, Lloyd Chambers (aka diglloyd) of the Mac Performance Guide has us convinced that the OWC Mercury Extreme SSD gives you the best performance for your computer and does it for a long time.

If you’ve read through diglloyd’s testing before, you know how detailed and thorough his tests can be. This time, he’s subjecting his test drives to some “real world” stresses, including what he calls “Severe Duty.” While the aspects covered are extremely advanced and specially tuned for those who need to eke out the last bit of speed out of your Mac, the consistency and reliability of the Mercury Extreme’s performance when compared to “the other guys” is quite convincing – even for those of us who just want to launch our applications a little faster.

Check out diglloyd’s findings at Mac Performance Guide. Then, once you’ve seen how great these drives perform, pop on over to our site and pick one up. You won’t be sorry.

Comment on this post.
Category: Product Spotlight
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

OWC Mercury Extreme SSD Continues to Rake In the Praise.

Monday, May 3rd, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Hot on the heels of being highly acclaimed by Lloyd Chambers of Mac Performance Guide, the OWC Mercury Extreme SSD just won an Editor’s Choice award over at TweakTown.

While Mac Performance Guide, not surprisingly, concerns itself with Macs, TweakTown comes from a wider, PC-oriented view. As such, all the tests on the Mercury Extreme were performed on a Windows box, and merits judged on its comparison to others in a Windows environment.

The testers were quite impressed with the Extreme’s price, availability and warranty, things that apparently leave much to be desired on “the other side” but OWC customers get every day! Also of great importance to them was the SandForce SF-1200 controller, as that’s one of the best performing SSD controllers on the market today.

While I’ll leave the details of the test for your own reading pleasure, I think their summary says it best:

The OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise SSD is priced to sell, offers incredible performance and has a warranty that is longer than most, if not all of their competitors. This is the SandForce SF-1200 you should buy if shopping right now.

Yeah… I’d say that’s about right. In fact you should go get one now!

For for the best-value upgrades, whether you’re using a Mac or a PC, your best bet is OWC!

Comment on this post.
Category: Product Spotlight
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

OWC Mercury Extreme SSDs – Performance That Goes the Distance

Friday, April 30th, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Solid State drives (SSDs) like the OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise Class SSD are really great pieces of technology. Since there are no moving parts, they are not only less susceptible to physical shock, but they also allow for faster transfer speeds.

It’s that second feature that has led many power users who have a “need for speed” to look to SSDs as the storage medium of choice when maxing out their computers.

Unfortunately, this speed boost may ultimately prove temporary, especially if you write data to your drive frequently, such as using your SSD as a scratch disk. In a recent article discussing the long-term performance of solid state drives, Lloyd Chambers of Mac Performance Guide, a long-time Mac performance expert, puts it this way:

The honeymoon might feel good, but 3/6/9 months later, you might want a divorce! Many SSDs just don’t hold up with use. They can hold up just fine for casual use (web, email, etc), but become badly degraded in other scenarios.

Article Continues…

Comment on this post.
Category: Product Spotlight
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

OWC Mercury Extreme SSD already gathering accolades.

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

‘Twas the day before Macworld, and while others were resting,
diglloyd was busy benchmarking and testing.
And what to his wondering eyes did appear…
But some SSD benchmarks no one else comes near.

Yep, that’s just what it sounds like. As OWC’s contingent braves the elements on the flight out to San Francisco for Macworld Expo 2010, Lloyd Chambers (diglloyd) of the Macintosh Performance Guide has posted his review of the new OWC Mercury Extreme solid state drive, and his review was positively glowing with praise for OWC’s latest offering.

Here’s just a sample of some of the great things he had to say: Article Continues…

This post has 50 comments.
Category: Benchmarking/Performance, Product Spotlight
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Putting It All Together: Tips for better SSD Usage.

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | Author: OWC Michael

puzzle-piecesIf you upgrade a Mac to an SSD drive – having good management of your files is important where you use an additional drive or drives to have capacity for your photo, music, video libraries, etc.  With the relatively small sizes of SSD drives, they can fill up with data fast; but the performance benefits of SSD are undeniable.

If you’ve been following our blog since the beginning, we’ve given several tips on relocating these types of files off your internal storage on onto external storage solutions. Today’s modern operating systems make this pretty easy.

For those audiophiles out there, an iTunes library can quickly become an overwhelming size.  Back in March, we showed you how to move your iTunes library to an external hard drive such as the Mercury On-the-Go Pro.

Photography enthusiasts will also find their pictures taking up more and more hard drive space.  You can also move your iPhoto library to an external drive to keep your primary drive lean and operating at top speeds.

My basic rule of thumb to follow is to keep the Operating System and your applications themselves on the main, internal hard drive while storing the files, documents, pictures, movies, music, etc. on the separate drive.  By doing so, you can even use a 64GB SSD for boot and application performance benefits WHILE maintaining access to extensive file libraries that can’t all fit onto an SSD.

Check out OWC’s full selection of SSD Drives and External Hard Drive Solutions to find the fit that’s right for you.

This post has 6 comments.
Category: OWC Difference, Random Thoughts & Topics, Tech Tips
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Breathe New Life into your Mac with SSD!

Friday, October 2nd, 2009 | Author: OWC Michael

stopwatchWe’re continuing  our diligent work here at the OWC testing lab benchmarking every machine compatible with Snow Leopard and should be ready to start posting some of the results soon.

In the meantime, however, we found some great nuggets of information that we’d like to share!

For our latest test, we took two machines in which the most memory that can be installed was 2GB, maxed out their memory, and checked the performance gains that installing a faster hard drive can provide.  The results were quite impressive!

The Contenders:

MacBookiMacG5The original 2006 MacBook 13″
1.83GHz Core Duo running OS 10.6.1


The 2004 iMac G5 20″
PowerPC 1.8GHz running 10.5.8

Heres what we found:DriveSpeedTests

  • The Photoshop Action Test measures the time (in seconds) it takes to execute a custom action script comprising of 47 commonly-used, memory-intensive processes on a 21 megapixel image using Adobe Photoshop CS4. It is designed to represent an average photo editing session of a graphic artist. No other processes are running in the background besides those that keep the machine itself running. This is pure, linear computing where every available resource is on hand for the one test running.  Lower times are better.
  • Our Stress Test is a variation on the Photoshop Action Test where the test is performed while iTunes is playing music with the visualizer running. This test adds one additional program to represent that additional light computing we do on the side in real life. With the Visualizer on, the resource draw on the machine is not limited to processor power and memory but to the video card and memory allocated for video as well. Lower times are better.
  • The 16 Program Launch test simply measures the time (in seconds) it takes for 16 common programs* from OS X and iLife to open simultaneously.  Lower times are better.
  • The Boot Time Test is exactly what it sounds like – the time it takes to boot the machine.  Again, lower times are better.

Considering the investment that a new Apple computer can cost, it makes sense to get all you can out of the machine you have before taking the plunge.  Installing a Solid State Drive can certainly extend the retirement date of your existing Mac for a fraction of the cost of a new computer.

*Address Book, Calculator, Chess, Dictionary, DVD Player, GarageBand, iCal, iChat, iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, Preview, QuickTime, Stickies, and TextEdit
This test measures the time (in seconds) it takes to execute a custom action script comprising of 47 commonly-used, memory-intensive processes on a 21 megapixel image using Adobe Photoshop CS4. It is designed to represent an average photo editing session of a graphic artist. No other processes are running in the background besides those that keep the machine itself running. This is pure, linear computing where every available resource is on hand for the one test running. Photoshop CS4 is a 32 bit program that has a limit of 3GB of memory that can be used by the program itself so timing should not differentiate greatly with additional memory added to the system.
When CS5 is released from Adobe as a true 64 bit program, we are expecting that any additional memory added to the system is going to speed up a single process like this, but once you have all the memory in the system that the single process can use, and you’re running no other processes, the differences in time are very slight. Lower times are better.

This post has 7 comments.
Category: Benchmarking/Performance
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Next Entries »