I purchased this after getting a new Late 2015 iMac Retina. The iMac has a 1TB 7200 RPM drive and my previous Mac was a Mini that I had upgraded with an OWC SSD. I became spoiled having an SSD and really wanted to decrease boot and program load times substantially. Initially, I looked at Thunderbolt 2 enclosures, but couldn’t see enough benefit due to the increased cost. I labored over specs for days and had a few email exchanges with Rebecca @ OWC sales/support to clarify things that I was unsure about. As in my previous dealings with OWC she was professional, patient and informative.
I decided to go with a USB 3.0 enclosure as a trade off for just a little less speed for a lot less money. I ordered it on a Sunday, with Monday being a holiday. So the drive was shipped promptly on Tuesday as expected and arrived within two days. Not at all bad for free shipping!
When it arrived, I started with some simple benchmarks. I used XBench and saw results of 314-400MB/s write and read speeds. Certainly an improvement over the internal 7200 RPM Seagate which gave read/write of 162-172MB/s. The enclosure feels rock solid, is attractive and blends with the design elements of my iMac and supporting Twelve South HiRise.
So on to making a bootable clone. For this I used SuperDuper. That process was fairly simple and after 2.5 hours it was complete and I was ready for the moment of truth. After changing the startup drive designation and rebooting, program load times were reduced significantly. I don’t have hard numbers on these, but as a “for instance” when I would click on System Preferences I would get the bouncing icon for 5-30 seconds. Now it’s instantaneous. Office applications used to take several seconds and now just fly open.
After a shutdown I timed the startup sequence. It does take a little longer for the iMac to find/mount the drive but overall boot time has been reduced from 1:15 to 41 seconds. Less than half the time of previous booting.
All things considered I’m quite pleased with the performance improvements that this external SSD has brought me. I would not go so far as to say it’s a “true SSD experience”, but it is darn close. I don’t have the means to monitor the temperature of the drive, but any time that I place my hand on the enclosure it’s cool to the touch. And of course it’s completely quiet. I gave it a 4-star rating because ½ stars weren’t available. The only thing that keeps it from being a 5-star is that I really hoped for a bit more speed. Yes, I’m a very critical consumer.
The instructional videos from OWC are very good. I have relied upon them when installing an SSD in my old Mini. But the process of opening my 2015 iMac (that’s still under warranty) to swap the drive was a bit daunting.
Time will tell in regards to the stability and longevity of this arrangement for my uses. But I do have a lot of faith in the quality of OWC products. Every Mac I’ve owned has been upgraded with RAM or SSD’s from OWC. In six years I haven’t had one failure.