SSD Help. OWC vs Sandisk

[griz]

I'm in the market for an SSD for my White Macbook Unibody. I'm currently testing it with a 40GB OWC Mercury Extreme 3G and love it. It is on loan and I'll need to buy my own. I want something a little bigger but am having trouble spending $183 for a 120GB OWC drive when I can buy a 120GB Sandisk drive for $139. They both use the same Sandforce processor as well. Benchmarks look comparable but when I posed that same dilemma to a customer support person at OWC, I was just told I would be paying less for an inferior drive and that OWC drives repeatedly test better than the competition. Typical sales reply. Not sure what else I expected. So I thought I would put it out to the masses. Does anyone have anything good or bad to say about either of these drives? Would be a big help in making my decision. My other option is to get the OWC 60GB, but again, $124 for half the storage and nearly the same price as the Sandisk doesn't seem right. Unless there is a compelling reason, I'd rather not spend more. Oddly Sandisk's 60GB offering is $119. The Sandisk 120 Seems like the best deal but I have had great luck with OWC and trust their products.
Thanks,
Scott

 

[Weaselboy]

Buy whatever is cheapest that has the specs you want. The OWC rep. is full of it.

If the Sandisk is using the same model Sandforce controller, there is absolutely no difference. No reason to pay more for OWC.

 

[griz]

If the Sandisk is using the same model Sandforce controller, there is absolutely no difference. No reason to pay more for OWC.

That was my thought, but I wasn't sure if they were doing something different in custom firmware or with the NAND they use.
Would be nice to see benchmarks from both from the same platform.

 

[Weaselboy]

That was my thought, but I wasn't sure if they were doing something different in custom firmware or with the NAND they use.

They are not. Read this. OWC uses the exact same firmware as everybody else in their SSD and it is off the shelf NAND. The rest is just marketing.

 

[griz]

They are not. Read this. OWC uses the exact same firmware as everybody else in their SSD and it is off the shelf NAND. The rest is just marketing.

Thanks,
It's amazing how the other drives look identical internally except for the branding. I ordered the Sandisk 120. Keeping my fingers crossed. I have done well by OWC but that difference in price is just not reasonable.

 

[griz]

I went with the Sandisk SSD and couldn't be happier. In fact I just bought 2 more for an office server. They will be configured as a striped raid. Preliminary tests on a 2008 MacPro running both drives in a software striped raid is achieving on average 380MB/second reads and writes. Can't complain about that.

 

[Weaselboy]

Glad it is working out for you.