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OWC new 6G SSD Sandforce Drives - Worth it?? realworld improvements?

I'm curious to see as well. I sure wish production would ramp up and bring the prices down. It's so hard to spend that much more money on a SSD when a mechanical drive with bigger capacity is so much cheaper.
 
richpjr said:
I'm curious to see as well. I sure wish production would ramp up and bring the prices down. It's so hard to spend that much more money on a SSD when a mechanical drive with bigger capacity is so much cheaper.
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There are no mechanical drives in this form factor ? He's referencing the 6G for the 2011 MBA.
 
1BadMac said:
There are no mechanical drives in this form factor ? He's referencing the 6G for the 2011 MBA.
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Sorry, poorly worded on my point. I do realize there are no mechanical drives in the MBAs - I was just whining about notebook drives costing so much less than SSDs.
 
They aren't compatible with our 3 2010 11"MBA's

We have a 480 GB 3G SSD in each one of ours, they are light years faster than stock, can only imagine how fast the 6G would be, if you can afford it,it is highly recommended. in addition to our 3, I have done the same for 26 friends, none of us have had any issues, love OWC:cool:
 
The 6g SSDs are indeed very nice, but I feel the MBA is bottlenecked by other things than the stock SSD, which is pretty fast already, especially if you have the Samsung version.

You might shave off 1-2 secs on boot and apps that take 3 secs to launch will launch in 2.5 secs, other than that I guess the biggest increase will be on synthetic benchmarks.

In a year or so when 256GB+ SSDs will drop in price I guess a little speed increase bundled with expanding your storage will be worth it, but dropping $600 on a little speed increase for a 240GB SSD is just too much, at least for me. The SSD alone is costing half of what the MBA costs
 
Cheffy Dave said:
We have a 480 GB 3G SSD in each one of ours, they are light years faster than stock, can only imagine how fast the 6G would be, if you can afford it,it is highly recommended. in addition to our 3, I have done the same for 26 friends, none of us have had any issues, love OWC:cool:
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Got any GeekBench benchmarks for us you could share - specifically 2011 13" i7?
 
jamesr19 said:
Got any GeekBench benchmarks for us you could share - specifically 2011 13" i7?
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Since the poster specifically stated they had (3) 2010's and no 2011's, I wouldn't look for them to come from him.

I'm sure others will post once they start to trickle out.
 
I would be interested to see the real world usage differences as well.

I would suspect that unless copying large files to and from your computer is a big part of what you use your MBA for, the real world implications of having a faster SSD are probably going to be insignificant (and almost certainly not worth the price unless you have cash to burn).
 
cluthz said:
The 6g SSDs are indeed very nice, but I feel the MBA is bottlenecked by other things than the stock SSD, which is pretty fast already, especially if you have the Samsung version.

You might shave off 1-2 secs on boot and apps that take 3 secs to launch will launch in 2.5 secs, other than that I guess the biggest increase will be on synthetic benchmarks.

In a year or so when 256GB+ SSDs will drop in price I guess a little speed increase bundled with expanding your storage will be worth it, but dropping $600 on a little speed increase for a 240GB SSD is just too much, at least for me. The SSD alone is costing half of what the MBA costs
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Unfortunately, from last year, a lot of these faster ssds have not dropped that much in price.

Of course, the cost is ridiculous considering the marginal benefit, for most of us.

Gregintosh said:
I would be interested to see the real world usage differences as well.

I would suspect that unless copying large files to and from your computer is a big part of what you use your MBA for, the real world implications of having a faster SSD are probably going to be insignificant (and almost certainly not worth the price unless you have cash to burn).
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Yes, real world applications of the drives with the mbas is not so obvious. If you have great benchmarks, so what?
 
Cheffy Dave said:
We have a 480 GB 3G SSD in each one of ours, they are light years faster than stock, can only imagine how fast the 6G would be, if you can afford it,it is highly recommended. in addition to our 3, I have done the same for 26 friends, none of us have had any issues, love OWC:cool:
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I thought the 480GB 3G SSD from owc was actually pretty close in benchmarks to the samsung ssd blade. Although you might be referring to owc vs toshiba. Or I might be totally wrong on all points. No matter what the difference I couldn't personally justify the huge extra cost unless I required 360 or 480GB in which case theres no other choice I guess.
 
marrzie said:
I thought the 480GB 3G SSD from owc was actually pretty close in benchmarks to the samsung ssd blade. Although you might be referring to owc vs toshiba. Or I might be totally wrong on all points. No matter what the difference I couldn't personally justify the huge extra cost unless I required 360 or 480GB in which case theres no other choice I guess.
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If you look at the BareFeats benchmarks, the three drives all performed better in different items. The Toshiba was better @ small random reads / writes, Samsung and Aura better at other. Aura slightly outperformed the Samsung, but nothing I would consider noticeable real world.

Bottom line - unless you are copying / transferring large amounts of data in and out of your Air, you won't see / feel the real world difference. I had a 6gbps OCZ 240 in my MBP and I can't feel any difference "downgrading" to my Toshiba based 2011 Air. And I feel no difference in my 15" Samsung based MBP for work.
 
It depends on what you're going to do with the drives. For most people they will never notice a difference between a 6GB/s and 3GB/s setup.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4341/ocz-vertex-3-max-iops-patriot-wildfire-ssds-reviewed/3

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Those tests put the 'old' Intel X-25 drive up against the newest from OCZ.
 
This announcement from OWC actually means a step back for us as they removed the 360GB option from the list. They must've considered it would be more attractive to buyers than the 6G 240GB. It sure would to me.
 
1BadMac said:
If you look at the BareFeats benchmarks, the three drives all performed better in different items. The Toshiba was better @ small random reads / writes, Samsung and Aura better at other. Aura slightly outperformed the Samsung, but nothing I would consider noticeable real world.

Bottom line - unless you are copying / transferring large amounts of data in and out of your Air, you won't see / feel the real world difference. I had a 6gbps OCZ 240 in my MBP and I can't feel any difference "downgrading" to my Toshiba based 2011 Air. And I feel no difference in my 15" Samsung based MBP for work.
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Ya I guess chaffy must do a lot of large data transfers. Of course he has 2 and I have none so I have no idea really.
 
jamesr19 said:
Got any GeekBench benchmarks for us you could share - specifically 2011 13" i7?
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Got the 240 GB 6G for an 11 inch i7 1.8. Put it in a day or so ago. Geekbench (64 bit) is 6347. Just ran it.
 
Last edited:
Geekbench scores are not impacted by drive throughput. It measures RAM and CPU. You'll need to use a disk tester of some sorts for some before and after.
 
1BadMac said:
Geekbench scores are not impacted by drive throughput. It measures RAM and CPU. You'll need to use a disk tester of some sorts for some before and after.
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I realize that. It is interesting, but the geek bench average for my setup is about 5750, and the machine with the 6G SSD reads 6347. I wonder what I'm doing?
 
Geekbench 64 gives different (better) results to the 32bit version. I have always seen a difference in the scores when changing the HD in other Macs though, not that significant though! Really need to look at before & after on same machine
 
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