What about them? When they make one as fast as the OWC drives, then MacRumors can give them some kudos.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
OWC SSDs Turn the 2011 Mac Mini Into a Powerhouse
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
What about them? When they make one as fast as the OWC drives, then MacRumors can give them some kudos.
OWC Mercury 6G benchmarks higher than any other SandForce driven SSD I've seen. For example:
http://barefeats.com/ssd6g.html
Agreed. Very high performing product (my girlfriend bought one ... I myself am not lucky enough to have SATA III) from an American company that is very Mac centric, eco-friendly, and has great customer service. I sound like a walking endorsement (check my join date for anyone skeptical) but OWC is a great company for Mac-heads.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)
For many users the new Minis are a huge improvement. However this article does highlight the importance of internal drives, an advantage that the Pro still has. OWC basically demonstrates that TB is already outdated for secondary storage. It would be really interesting to see what a RAID of four or five of these drives would do in a Mac Pro.
raymondthimmes said:
For many users the new Minis are a huge improvement. However this article does highlight the importance of internal drives, an advantage that the Pro still has. OWC basically demonstrates that TB is already outdated for secondary storage. It would be really interesting to see what a RAID of four or five of these drives would do in a Mac Pro.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)
TB simply isn't fast enough. I highly doubt any external GPU would be worth the cost to buy it. Mainly because the TB port is relatively slow relative to the bandwidth available to common video cards.
Anaemik said:
TB simply isn't fast enough. I highly doubt any external GPU would be worth the cost to buy it. Mainly because the TB port is relatively slow relative to the bandwidth available to common video cards.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)
This whole thing is silly anyways. Think about it no matter how one defines SSD it is wrong. Flash storage is not a disk nor is it a drive. There is no mechanical mechanism in a SSD so it can't be a drive and obviously isn't a disk.
We really should be calling them flash storage modules.
Anaemik said:
This whole thing is silly anyways. Think about it no matter how one defines SSD it is wrong. Flash storage is not a disk nor is it a drive. There is no mechanical mechanism in a SSD so it can't be a drive and obviously isn't a disk.
We really should be calling them flash storage modules.
Please note I said *some way* toward mitigating the issue, and I was very careful with my choice of words. I'm not suggesting that people take this as a green light to go plugging the latest and greatest GPU into their Minis, but obviously there are still plenty of options left for increasing GPU performance beyond the default SandyBridge GPU.
Having said that, this is TB 1.0, and it looks like the bandwidth is very scalable, especially once the fibre interconnects are introduced. I don't think it will be too far into the future where we can expect to have the full PCIe bandwidth in a machine exposed through the TB ports.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)
Actually you don't do much better here. It is well known that secondary storage has been getting slower and slower over the years relative to RAM. So that part you got right.
The problem is that you then discount the value of multiple cores which is a shame. If it wasn't for multiple cores we wouldn't have the responsive operating systems we do have these days. Frankly all these cores enable things like Grand Central Dispatch.
In a nut shell the problem of slow access to secondary storage is unrelated to the value of multiple cores. Slow secondary storage sucks but so would a single core machine.
utahnguy said:
Actually you don't do much better here. It is well known that secondary storage has been getting slower and slower over the years relative to RAM. So that part you got right.
The problem is that you then discount the value of multiple cores which is a shame. If it wasn't for multiple cores we wouldn't have the responsive operating systems we do have these days. Frankly all these cores enable things like Grand Central Dispatch.
In a nut shell the problem of slow access to secondary storage is unrelated to the value of multiple cores. Slow secondary storage sucks but so would a single core machine.
but seriously, SSD drive? Solid State Drive Drive?
Still a whole lot better than german made "SS Drive".
Yeah, "Drive drive" is redundant, but things like that creep up in language all the time. For us tech savvy people, it sounds dumb, but for the layman, the extra "drive" will at least give them an inkling as to what we're talking about
Pick your fights, or die young with the amount of idiots in the world...
I'll go listen to music on my "iTouch"...
Does anybody know of a reputable OWC outlet in the UK? From my (limited) research it seems like they are almost exclusively a US based company. Their website doesn't have an international wing as far as I can tell, and a cursory Googling of OWC distributors in the UK didn't yield too much.
Where does utahnguy talk about single core? His comparison was about the speed increases offered by quad-core over dual core vs. (fast) SSD vs. HDD. And I take a SSD over a quad-core any day. But I also take a 'dual' dual core (aka quad core) over a dual SSD (aka RAID 0).
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A5274d Safari/7534.48.3)
It is really! Buy the dedicated gfx one of you need 3D power or server if you need CPU power. Put a sad and some ram in it and you have a mac pro mini!
Thunderbolt will give us super fast external drives and also external gfx cards!!
raymondthimmes said:
It is really! Buy the dedicated gfx one of you need 3D power or server if you need CPU power. Put a sad and some ram in it and you have a mac pro mini!
Thunderbolt will give us super fast external drives and also external gfx cards!!
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)
Does this article imply that the 10.7 RAID install issue has been resolved? Perhaps I need to ask my OWC rep about it.
Does this article imply that the 10.7 RAID install issue has been resolved? Perhaps I need to ask my OWC rep about it.
Or, they're virtually identical. I'd throw my hat in with Anand's assessments over almost any other site's:
With the exception of the (temporary?) 4KB random write cap and slightly higher power consumption, OWC's Mercury Extreme Pro 6G is a dead ringer for OCZ's Vertex 3 - at least at the 120GB capacity.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4315/owc-mercury-extreme-pro-6g-ssd-review-120gb/9I have the same 2006 Mac Pro (16gb Ram, new SSD with Lion, 4870 graphics) and I just bought the standard mini server (2x500 7200, 4GB). Last night I ran a Handbrake encoding test on the two machines side by side, 4 encodes @ ATV2 setting from MKV blu-ray. The mini server beat out the Mac Pro by about 20%... it finished all 4 and the Pro had about 60% of the last one still left to finish.
And that was with the stock drives and I was running 2 other programs on the mini. I imaging it would be much faster from SSD, or an SSD RAID.
I am very impressed with the mini server. But it does heat up when encoding, the CPU gets up to 190F and that fan is blasting like a hairdryer at 5500rpm.
"Powerhouse?" Come now, MacRumors, let's not get carried away...
Please tell me I'm not the only one who thinks quick R/W does NOT imply "powerhouse."
Please tell me I'm not the only one who thinks quick R/W does NOT imply "powerhouse."
They offer the same performance as an OCZ Vertex 3 counterpart.Comparison - anandtech, but OCZ's drives are generally cheaper (larger market share).
Encoding doesn't really rely on your harddrive speeds. It's all CPU (unless you have really awful sequential read/write speeds).
Ok, well is still is pretty impressive compared to that power hungry beast (Mac Pro).
Well, the SSDs OWC sells are fast as hell..
but seriously, SSD drive? Solid State Drive Drive?
Yea well this wonderful language of ours has lots of these abuses... George Carlin made millions from them.
Final Destination
Preheat the oven
Getting on the plane
Personal Belongings
Are just a few that still make me laugh...
Not solved... The lacking of a disc or disk knocks that down... Nice try tho...
Tho:
Solid State Device Drive would work but even that is pushing thing..