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OWCs Finger in my backside
- Thread starter rantingrich
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I got some of OWC's Mercury Pro 6G drives when they first dropped and were teh hotness. I had good experiences with them, ran them on a RAID0 setup in 2 regular SATA bays for a few years, had no problems.
I too got the Sonnet Tempo Pro card, installed the OWC drives and... no real problems, they worked, but they were just very very slow, figured it was time to pull the trigger and upgrade to a pair of Samsung 840 Pros, speed almost doubled on benchmarks, though honestly subjectively speaking it's very hard to tell the difference unless you're grinding giant video files.
Repurposed the OWC drives into some old media servers, they still haven't dropped dead but they're going on year 3+, if they die I'll get a free replacement since they have 5yr warranties, but that's about it.
I feel I got my money's worth, but definitely not something I would buy today.
FWIW, OWC's firmware updater is just horrible. It has gone from absolutely awful (read: must re-install the very old optical drive I pulled out of the drive bay years ago, in order to update it), to just mediocre (their grub-based flash drive installer). It's worked with no problems on one of the drives I had, while the other OWC drive simply refuses to update the firmware at all. It's under warranty so I could get a RMA and send it back, but it works and I just can't be bothered to deal with it.
Not to disturb your ranting Rich ;-) but I'd call it a day and get over it, time to upgrade your SSDs and probably not with OWC products, I think at this stage of the game the "custom SSD" market has played itself out and you're left with the big dogs, Samsung, Intel, etc.
If you click on my name and search through some of my posts over the years, everything I just said is more or less documented as I was experimenting with it and I've always stated my own experiences with OWC's products in threads where peeps were hating on them. Yes they are over-priced, but they do cater to a mac-specific market; sometimes they have really great products that hit it out of the park, sometimes they have over-priced dreck, mostly I'm happy with their company and will continue buying whatever products they have which fit my needs, but in 2014 that really does not include their SSD products (too old, too slow, too over-priced).
I too got the Sonnet Tempo Pro card, installed the OWC drives and... no real problems, they worked, but they were just very very slow, figured it was time to pull the trigger and upgrade to a pair of Samsung 840 Pros, speed almost doubled on benchmarks, though honestly subjectively speaking it's very hard to tell the difference unless you're grinding giant video files.
Repurposed the OWC drives into some old media servers, they still haven't dropped dead but they're going on year 3+, if they die I'll get a free replacement since they have 5yr warranties, but that's about it.
I feel I got my money's worth, but definitely not something I would buy today.
FWIW, OWC's firmware updater is just horrible. It has gone from absolutely awful (read: must re-install the very old optical drive I pulled out of the drive bay years ago, in order to update it), to just mediocre (their grub-based flash drive installer). It's worked with no problems on one of the drives I had, while the other OWC drive simply refuses to update the firmware at all. It's under warranty so I could get a RMA and send it back, but it works and I just can't be bothered to deal with it.
Not to disturb your ranting Rich ;-) but I'd call it a day and get over it, time to upgrade your SSDs and probably not with OWC products, I think at this stage of the game the "custom SSD" market has played itself out and you're left with the big dogs, Samsung, Intel, etc.
If you click on my name and search through some of my posts over the years, everything I just said is more or less documented as I was experimenting with it and I've always stated my own experiences with OWC's products in threads where peeps were hating on them. Yes they are over-priced, but they do cater to a mac-specific market; sometimes they have really great products that hit it out of the park, sometimes they have over-priced dreck, mostly I'm happy with their company and will continue buying whatever products they have which fit my needs, but in 2014 that really does not include their SSD products (too old, too slow, too over-priced).
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... taking the thread a whole new direction, you can add me to your website visitors. :roll eyes:
I too had a Mac IIci. Not my first Apple, but definitely the pinnacle of their quality control, speed, and being WAY ahead of anyone else making computers. For some reason, it always stuck with me that from the time you hit the start button until it was ready to use was 7 seconds
These old macs could also boot from a Ramdisk! If i remember correctly the macII (or the MacII FX?)booted in something like 3 seconds.
And yes it was a non volatile ramdisk.
As a techie allow me to be frank.
If you need any technical support use this forum first for any upgrade help.
All of us here have more brains and knowledge about these systems than all of the companies level 1, 2, and 3 'experts' put together.
They use flow charts and we all use the real world!
Just don't rant at us cos we do it for free and not all here 24/7!
If you need any technical support use this forum first for any upgrade help.
All of us here have more brains and knowledge about these systems than all of the companies level 1, 2, and 3 'experts' put together.
They use flow charts and we all use the real world!
Just don't rant at us cos we do it for free and not all here 24/7!
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