Having offered award-winning products and services to Mac owners worldwide for over 21 years, OWC drew upon its experience to create a comprehensive and convenient program. Now mid 2010 Apple iMac
27" owners can confidently customize their iMac 27" to their own unique specifications and experience less hassle and downtime than using any other upgrade service.
But exactly what are these upgrades going to do for you?
Until now, the fastest external port the iMac has been equipped with is a FireWire 800 port. While fast enough to cover the transfer speed of a standard, platter-based hard drive,
FireWire 800 just can't keep up with the blazing speed of an
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD drive.
The graph on the right shows the results of speed testing our 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD via each of the available native ports on a 3.2GHz 27" iMac Intel Core i3 Mid 2010 model as
well as with the eSATA port addition from OWC.
By utilizing the eSATA port, transfer rates are up to 3.3 times faster than FireWire 800 and an amazing 7.5 times faster than USB 2.0!
Click on the images below to see the QuickBench 4.0 speed results in connecting various drives to each of the ports available on the 27" iMac.
longer bars mean faster transfer rates and less time waiting
SSD External Drive
over eSATA
Utilizing a direct-connect style enclosure with a single 240GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD installed
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Mini
SSD over eSATA
Utilizing the 240GB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini 'Quad Interface' SSD Portable Storage Solution
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 7200RPM drive over eSATA
Utilizing the 2.0TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro
'Quad Interface' 7200RPM Storage Solution
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Mini
SSD over FW800
Utilizing the 240GB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini 'Quad Interface' SSD Portable Storage Solution
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro
7200RPM drive over FW800
Utilizing the 2.0TB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro
'Quad Interface' 7200RPM Storage Solution
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro
SSD drive over USB 2.0
Utilizing the 240GB OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini 'Quad Interface' SSD Portable Storage Solution
Adding an SSD to your iMac not only will decrease boot time and increase the speed in which you can access your data, but with multiple
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSDs, you can achieve transfer rates so high, it will give
you near instantaneous access to all your data.
We took our stock 27-inch 3.2GHz Intel Core i3 iMac and ran QuickBench on the internal 7200RPM platter-based hard drive. At 123MB/sec we were already well over the 100MB/sec transfer rate of
any FireWire 800 external hard drive. Replacing that drive with a single 240GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD resulted in more than double the speed!
Here's where it got interesting though...as OWC can install up to three Solid State Drives in a single 27-inch iMac, rather than keep them as separate locations, we used Disk Utility to
concatenate the drives into a single RAID 0 (Striped) volume*. The transfer rates then increased dramatically achieving rates
up to 6 times faster than the stock hard drive alone!
longer bars mean faster transfer rates and less time waiting
Stock 1.0TB 7200RPM HDD
As received from Apple.
Single SSD
Replacing the main hard drive from Apple with a single 240GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD
Dual SSD - RAID 0
Utilizing two 240GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSDs setup in a RAID 0 configuration*
Three SSDs - RAID 0
Utilizing three 240GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSDs setup in a RAID 0 configuration*
* NOTE: iMacs configured through the OWC Turnkey Upgrade Program will be set up as independent drives. For information on RAID arrays, visit
OWC RAID Central.
Maximizing the memory in your 27" iMac can almost cut your processing time in half, saving you minutes at a time waiting for images to render as shown in the graph on the right
and the chart below.
Your OS and applications can certainly run on the minimum memory, but having more memory installed makes for a much more enjoyable and productive user experience, especially when using memory
intensive A/V, photo, 3D modeling, and gaming applications.
There is hardly any better return on investment you can make for your iMac than when you boost its memory. It is economical, easy to install, and gives a real performance boost that
you’ll immediately appreciate.
Why Upgrade with OWC Brand Memory?
Meets or exceeds manufacturer specifications.
Rigorously in-house lab tested to ensure superior quality, compatibility and reliability.
Backed by industry leading lifetime advanced replacement. If you need your OWC brand memory replaced, we will ship to you same day.
shorter bars mean faster execution time and less time waiting
"Adobe Photoshop CS5 Medium Action
Test" Results
This test measures the time (in seconds) it takes to execute a custom action script comprising of 45 commonly-used, memory-intensive processes on a 17,500 pixel wide image using Adobe Photoshop CS5. It is
designed to represent a system-straining photo editing session of a graphic artist on an iMac machine such as with multiple images, images with multiple layers, or large images such as retail signage,
movie posters, event signage, promotional banners and more. These same type of results can be expected from video production suites and other 64 bit applications.
“We are quite pleased to record another innovation in the Mac industry by offering the first
eSATA interface for an iMac,” said Larry O’Connor, Founder and CEO, Other World Computing. “By offering this performance enhancement along with faster, bigger, and better
options for memory and storage, an OWC upgraded iMac truly will be the best performing iMac a user can own.”
1-800-275-4576 
“We are quite pleased to record another innovation in the Mac industry by offering the first
eSATA interface for an iMac,” said Larry O’Connor, Founder and CEO, Other World Computing. “By offering this performance enhancement along with faster, bigger, and better
options for memory and storage, an OWC upgraded iMac truly will be the best performing iMac a user can own.”