What Can An OWC SSD Do For You?

Hey guys and gals out there… I work at OWC, but I’m just a warehouse guy. I’m certainly no “power user”, but luckily for me, the powers that be decided to let me test drive an OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD in a 2.0GHz 2011 MacBook Pro for them anyway…and all I can say is WOW!

My work consists of very frequent use of browsers, database applications, PDFs, spreadsheets, and the like. I usually have 5-12 apps running at any given time, and am always switching frequently between them.

Folks told me I “wouldn’t really” benefit from the additional speed the OWC Pro 6G SSD offered. All I can say is… well… “Wrong!”

This thing is fast; opening windows and switching between apps using Control-Tab is super fast and OS X’s “Spaces” move like lighting now. Minimizing and maximizing is likewise much faster.

One thing I regularly do is open and sort massive spreadsheets; 30,000 rows with 20 columns is a regular thing for me. Previously (on my 2007 MacBookPro), these beasts would take three to five minutes to open, and two to three minutes to sort, locking up my machine in the meantime. It was not uncommon for these operations to crash Excel unless I closed everything else down ahead of time. Embarrassingly enough, one of these crashes happened during a business meeting with partners—I attempted to sort out some requested data and we all watched while my MacBook Pro slowly struggled with and ultimately choked and crashed on the operation. It brought the meeting to an awkward halt while I restarted the app and ran it again a second time. It worked that time, but it certainly was not the kind of impression I intended to leave that day.

This OWC Pro 6G SSD has changed all that. These very same spreadsheets now open in 30-45 seconds, with huge sort actions completing in  less than 15 seconds! Not only that, but I can keep the rest of my apps running along in the background while I’m working, so I’m even faster overall. It’s simply amazing.

Bottom line? These small boosts, while not notable as stand-alone events, have a cumulative effect of greatly improving my productivity throughout the workday. I not only feel more productive, I am more productive. I wholeheartedly recommend the OWC Pro 6G SSD to anyone who benefits from increased daily productivity. The ROI is, in that sense, instant.

As part of the SSD install, I removed the SuperDrive and added in an OWC DataDoubler, using the original 500GB hard drive, which I split into two volumes: an internal Time Machine volume and bulk storage volume. Combined with my office external backup, I can be confident that, no matter what happens to my boot drive, I can be back up and running in minutes or hours, not extended hours or even days. Even if I’m off-site and some unforeseen event renders my boot volume DOA, I can restore from my internal Time Machine volume and keep on trucking, without needing that office backup to boot from.

Now that’s peace-of-mind that’s tough to beat.

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