Long-time readers have probably noticed that we’re not bashful talking about how great our products are. While all of what we say about the products is—to the best of our knowledge—true, I’m the first to admit that it’s kind of hard to take the word of someone who has a vested interest in selling you the product they’re talking about.
So, this time around, we’re letting some well-respected, independent reviewers say what we’ve probably already said a million times:
“More Memory=A Faster Mac”
Lloyd Chambers (aka diglloyd) from Mac Performance Guide knows about squeezing every last bit of performance out of your Mac. So, when he got a new quad-core 2011 MacBook Pro, and decided to put it up to test against a Mac Pro, what did he do? He maxed it out with OWC memory and dropped an OWC Mercury Extreme SSD in there, of course!
I won’t say that the OWC memory upgrade was the defining upgrade that kept the MacBook Pro running neck & neck with the Mac Pro it was up against, but as diglloyd posted the next day:
…then everything comes to a crawl, as it will with any Mac with too little memory…
It doesn’t get more clear than that – the more memory you have in your Mac, the better it will perform. Just ask diglloyd.
“The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD offers amazing speed increases for the price.”
Rob-ART over at Barefeats.com also recently got one of the new 2011 MacBook Pros with the 6Gb/s SATA bay and compared the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro to a number of standard drives, as well as to a 6Gb/s SSD.
Throughout the tests, the results of which you can see for yourself at the Barefeats site, the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD (which is a 3Gb/s drive) not only blew the stock Apple SSD out of the water, but also kept pace with the 6Gb/s SSD, actually coming out faster in the Large Sequential Write test.
So, if you’re a bit skeptical when we tout the performance increases our Mercury Extreme Pro SSDs deliver, just check with Rob-ART; he’s seen it first-hand.
Any idea if/when OWC will be coming out with their own 6GB/s “improved” SSD drives?
I’ve already purchased an OWC SSD drive for my 2009 MBP 17″ and it has been fantastic, and just yesterday received a 2011 2.3GHz 15″ MBP – and my OWC 8GB ram upgrade just arrived this afternoon. But, I figured it was worth waiting on replacing the factory installed 500GB 7200rpm hard drive until after OWC began to take advantage of the new 6GB/s capability of the hard drive SATA port. Just wondering about how long the wait will be.
Thanks,
Norm
Unfortunately, we cannot comment on future products, but keep an eye out on our blog as once new OWC brand products are available they will be announced here first.
Yes. I have, many times.
Two striped drives are not as fast as one OWC SSD. (I use the RE ones).
The Western Digital RE 4 models are BY FAR the closest thing you’ll get to an SSD if you stripe two of them.
The Hitachi’s, no.
Scott
Do you know if anyone has done a speed comparison of a striped Raid using dual 7200 rpm drives vs SSDs?
I currently have a 2.4GHz MBP with a striped hard drive RAID using dual Hitachi 7k500 drives and I’m upgrading to 8gb RAM from 6GB. I’m trying to figure out if it’s worth the $$ to go to striped ssds.