OWC Mercury Elite pro dual mini review. photos

I just built a nice mac mini hack into a mac "cube" .

Part of the hack was using 2 of these;

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/EliteALmini/RAID/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB


I used the empty version


http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEQMH0GBK/

Very nice piece of gear. here are the xbench scores with one unit holding a pair of hitachi 500 gb in a raid0

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc2=537328


second set is with a pair of samsung 64gb series 470 ssds in a raid 0

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc2=537331

i am also posting a photo of the mac mini build you can see the mac mini and here is a link to the full mac mini build


https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1178755/

tomorrow I am posting about 7 shots of this piece of gear. It is very well built and is working very nicely. the xbench scores are also nice and the mini runs fast.


here are inside shots of the gear. I am about to install the pair of 64gb new samsung ssd's series 470. you can see two philips screws allows the faceplate to come off. this aluminum is a good gauge and the unit has nice rubber feet to prevent marks. note to modes I have about about a dozen photos please forgive consecutive posts.

once the 2 screws come off the insides just slide out. note all eight drive screws four for each drive have rubber vibration grommets. also the sata jack is easy to get to. i have used dozens of raid cases. this one is well built

here are the pin settings for raid 0

left is down

center is up

right is down next to the pin settings a small on off switch

then the two samsungs in place.

then put in 8 screws see that I do them on an angle the will make an x after all 8 screws are attached. slide it in attach the screws and you ready to go

here are the disk scores for owc with a pair of samsung ssds and with a pair of hitachi. the one on the left is much better using the samsung hdds the one on the right is much lower using the hitachi. still for a long big clone the hitachi stays over 160Mbs write and 192 MBs read.

last shot shows the finished product
1 2009 mac mini
2 owc dual minis
and an apple superdrive. the owc really helps the looks.

I am going to do some aja and xbench with
fw800 instead of sata. may post that on the 5th.

here is a fw800 vs a sata using the samsung ssd's

as you can see the fw800 scores pretty good. I have done lots of test of raid0 cases and this is a very viable way of running ssds for an imac osx. your cost would be about 300 and it would be much faster then a stock 7200 rpm hdd. I also posted some aja scores.

this unit can be a really good low cost ssd choice for your imac 2009 and 2010 with fw800 connections. I have a shot of a 1 drive fw800 behind my iMac handy. but this owc piece is 85 bucks empty a pair of samsung series 470 64 gb ssds is about 99 each total of 283 or so. for an instant osx out of site and huge really huge improvements in osx speeds over the internal hdd.

this is xbench for my imac internal against the fw800 ssd raid0 the fw800 raid0 is 167 the internal seagate is 77. the random access is a lot better. for the external fw800 ssd the fw800 scores are on the left.