In case you somehow missed all the announcements yesterday, we’ve expanded our award-winning line of Solid State Drives to include options for the MacBook Air, legacy machines and small form factor notebooks.
The OWC line of SSDs now includes
- OWC Mercury Extreme Pro
- OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE
- OWC Mercury Extreme Pro Legacy Edition
- OWC Mercury Aura Pro Express
- OWC Mercury Aura Pro MBA
- OWC Mercury Aura Pro 1.8″
- OWC Mercury Legacy Pro
While you can find additional information on each of the product pages and in yesterday’s press releases, we’re bursting to show you how well these new additions work.
Below, we’ve got a pair of videos that show that the OWC Mercury Aura Pro MBA SSD not only speeds up booting and launching applications on a 2008/2009 MacBook Air, but it also lets you perform those same tasks faster than a 2010 2.66GHz i7 MacBook Pro!
These are both single-shot videos; no edits, cuts or fancy video trickery are involved. It’s just pure SSD speed.
Pretty impressive, huh? Of course, if you don’t believe us, and you happen to be at CES 2011, just stop by Booth #3935 in the North Hall (just off the iLounge Pavilion) and see it for yourself!
Other Topics You Might Like:
OWC Announces Mercury Aura Pro As Industry’s First Available High Performance Solid State Drive For All 2012 MacBook Air Models
OWC Announces Mercury Aura Pro Express/Aura Envoy as Industry’s First High-Performance SSD and Enclosure Bundle For MacBook Air Computers
OWC Highlights Depth and Breadth of Highly Rated Mercury SSD Line at CES
OWC Lowers Prices On SandForce-Based Mercury Pro SSDs For 2008/2009 MacBook Air, PowerBook/iBook/PC Notebook, And Netbook Computers
So is this available now or not? Need a drive for an older Airbook…
Some of the models are available for immediate shipment, others are not. The links above should take you to the product home pages. By clicking on the model you want, its availability will be noted in the upper part of the description page.
Just installed the OWC Aura Pro MBA 120 GB in my wife’s late ’08 MBA 1.6. HD was getting flakey so ran Drive Genius and it found 347 bad blocks. I immediately ordered the SSD (Jan 5). Just got it today so your timing was ‘almost’ perfect in the timing of the release. Start up time with the HD was 55 seconds and with the SSD it is now 25 seconds. The Dock icon for Safari doesn’t even bounce once and it is open. VERY impressed. Thank you guys so much!!
Installation was done following your video install but had to hop over to ifixit to figure out how to dislodge the speaker connection from the HD bracket (it had a sticky glue holding it was all), otherwise it was a piece of cake.
Also, what kind of operating system support do these need? Panther, Tiger–even OS 9 or 8 or even 7?
The operating system is irrelevant to the SSD. The drive needs to be formatted properly (GUID for an Intel-based Mac, Apple Partition Map for a PowerPC-based Mac, Master Boot Record/FAT32/FAT64 for DOS and Windows computers, etc.) but once it is you can install whichever operating system you’re using.
Great news! Some questions: These drives work in pretty much any Powerbook, right? From the PowerPC models up, of course. Including my Pismo?
Second: how do you deal with the size issue for the bigger SSD’s on these early macs? By that I mean the 128 GB limitiation? I know that with a firmware hack you can enable 48 bit addressing on all the g4 towers, but what about ibooks, imacs etc?
Yes, for installation and functionality, these solid state drives (SSD) work in any machine that uses the same physical form factor hard disk drive (HDD). For example, the 2.5″ PATA SSD works in systems that use a 2.5″ PATA HDD, the 1.8″ SATA SSD works in systems that use a 1.8″ SATA HDD, etc.
However, the 128GB limitation does still exists with ATA-1 through ATA-5 standards (barring any software alterations, firmware hacks, or hard drive controller cards) so the same rules apply when adding SSD to the system.