My guess is the fact that their PCIE SSD's were slated for the Sandforce 3700 controller which has been delayed and delayed and delayed. Last I heard they aren't slated until the first of the year to be released. Hard to release an SSD if the controller you picked isn't available....
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OWC Launches 1 TB SSD Upgrade Kits for 2010-2012 MacBook Air
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My guess is the fact that their PCIE SSD's were slated for the Sandforce 3700 controller which has been delayed and delayed and delayed. Last I heard they aren't slated until the first of the year to be released. Hard to release an SSD if the controller you picked isn't available....
Of course the "hack" being TRIM is needed. SSD without TRIM is a disaster waiting to happen.
OWC is being disingenuous.
I'd hardly call the lack of trim to be a disaster. I never bothered to turn it on in any of my macs and my SSDs are just fine. With enough down time which is very common for a consumer PC, the garbage collection can do a pretty good job.
I can only say you have been pretty unlucky. So far 5 purchases on OWC, including two different SSDs, not a single issue. And top-grade customer service: they sent me free rubber meets when I lost mine on a OWC Mercury case.
I read that over provisioning on the drives rendered TRIM unnecessary. Is that true?
GC is no substitute for TRIM. They don't even have the same purpose.
GC without TRIM is needlessly moving (writing) around datablocks, which were marked deleted by the OS. This puts unnecessary strain on the cells, and thus lowering the lifetime of the SSD.
PS: If TRIM is not necessary, why is Apple using it?
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No.
GC is no substitute for TRIM. They don't even have the same purpose.
GC without TRIM is needlessly moving (writing) around datablocks, which were marked deleted by the OS. This puts unnecessary strain on the cells, and thus lowering the lifetime of the SSD.
PS: If TRIM is not necessary, why is Apple using it?
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No.
Why is apple using it? Because so many people believe it is imperative because "the benchmarks tell them so". When Apple didn't support it, people were losing their mind about it even though everyone was fairly content with the overall SSD performance because garbage collection was fine. Then when it was supported in OSX it was suddenly imperative that all SSD's have it. If I cared about maximum read and writes (aka benchmarks) then maybe. But when it comes to SSD's, I care more about instant seek times, and small file transfers which is rarely benchmarked because it is so much more difficult to do. Everyone seems to always be concerned about large sequential file transfer sizes which is so rare to actually do on a day to day basis unless you are editing video and audio.
Fact of the matter is that for most day to day operations my slow older SSD's (i.e. Sandforce 1200's) feel just as fast as my external Thunderbolt enclosure with dual 1TB Samsung 840 EVOs in RAID 0. Why? Because it is rare that I would transfer large enough files that 250MB/s vs 800MB/s would matter.... I only have it setup that way so that expanding a VM takes less time and I do that pretty rarely (and accessing multiple VM's at any given moment is faster). My guess is that 99% of the people here rarely do what I do, so again it wouldn't matter.
EDIT: As for the lifetime reduction, are you serious? Do you know how long these drives are set to last in a consumer environment? Years and years.... I replace my drives long before they have run out of usefulness. Just a couple of years ago I was buying 60-120GB drives. Those have all been replaced (with the exception of one) for 240GB and better.
It's no secret it's proprietary form factor, but they've still been saying for months that they expect to be able to make them.