Cygnus Posted May 27, 2011 Share Posted May 27, 2011 This was a pleasant surprise today. My new SSD drive for my MBP finally arrived today and while installing it I noticed at the bottom of the top's label a US flag with "Designed and built in the USA"*. I never expected that on a hard drive. It's one of OWC's (macsales.com) new 240 GB Mercury Extreme Pro 6G drives. Don't expect OWC's other products to be made in the US though. They're mainly a reseller for Apple accessories. A lot of the OWC branded items appear to be rebranded version of the generic items similar to what you find with someplace like Best Buy or Fry's Electronics house brand. So manufacturing will vary with them. The external enclosure for the optical drive that came out doesn't have a "made in" marking on it. My guess is that it's imported. *Full disclosure, it does stat that it uses domestic and imported parts. So some of the guts do come from overseas. I'm guessing there's some parts that you can only get by import sort like how Adam's MF products are Korean. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MAYBEN Posted May 28, 2011 Share Posted May 28, 2011 I've been seeing a lot of stuff 'Designed in the USA' but not actually built here.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cygnus Posted May 28, 2011 Author Share Posted May 28, 2011 Yeah, like Apple gear. They always sports a "Designed in California" label but they're manufactured mainly in china. The drive did say "Designed and Build" though. I double checked before posting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MAYBEN Posted May 28, 2011 Share Posted May 28, 2011 Gotcha.. I was just saying I've been seeing it a lot lately where they put our Flag, but then in fine print made in china.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marylander Posted May 28, 2011 Share Posted May 28, 2011 Excellent. So it's a 240 gb ssd? Wow... Does that make a huge improvement in system speed? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cygnus Posted May 28, 2011 Author Share Posted May 28, 2011 I haven't had a lot of time to test it yet. I had a slight snafu with installing it (accidentally stripped a screw), so I didn't finish up until late last night. What I have seen from disk access is blazingly fast though. I run my machine dual boot with Snow Leopard and [redacted] (NDA . [Redacted] was installed from an installer that was on the SL partition of the drive to it's own partition. The OS installed in about 8 min. The last time I did it with the magnetic drive I believe it was in the 35 minute range. Installing Xcode took about 6 minutes which is usually a half hour or so process since it's 10 GB to install. Timing a launch of it, it's only taking 2.2 seconds. On my Mac Pro which is a faster machine it takes 8.5 seconds and that's with a VelociRaptor (the fastest magnetic drive) as the drive in it. An app you guys are probably more familiar with, Photoshop, took 4.5 sec. launch time. The mac pro was 8.3 seconds. So I'm seeing a pretty good improvement with install and launch tests. Now I need to gets some real world tests to see how it will effect everyday operations. I'm betting it'll make a decent difference in my compile time and with the automatic API documentation in Xcode 4. Oh, and one other thing I timed last night. It took 27 seconds to boot up to a usable desktop. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marylander Posted May 28, 2011 Share Posted May 28, 2011 Thanks for the updates. I was surpassed to see the price of that drive; it's pretty tempting to try that myself. I look forward to your real world impressions. Ad does the MBP run any cooler with it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cygnus Posted July 5, 2011 Author Share Posted July 5, 2011 Thanks for the updates. I was surpassed to see the price of that drive; it's pretty tempting to try that myself. I look forward to your real world impressions. Ad does the MBP run any cooler with it? After using it for a month, all I can say is wow. It makes a huge difference. Everything feels so much snappier that it's amazing. It really has me spoiled. Using my Mac Pro feels like a dog even though it benches about 45% faster than my MBP. Half the time, like now, I'm sitting in my desk chair with the MBP on my lap instead of using the desktop machine that's sitting in front of me. My two monitors haven't suddenly become really fancy lights. I'm completely sold on using an SSD. So much so that I'm seriously considering when the next Mac Mini refresh comes that I might buy the server version (dual drives), replace one of the drives with an SSD, and use that for my desktop over the Mac Pro. That's assuming the new minis are i5s or i7s. I'm really only using the desktop for coding, email, IM, etc. now. So I don't think the Mini will hurt me speed wise since most of the extra power in the Mac Pros come from more cores and most of what I'm doing won't take advantage of it. So I'm thinking I'm better off with the $1000 mini + $550 drive over a $3500 Mac Pro. They eat a lot less power and generate a lot less heat too which will be nice for the AZ summers and my electric bill. As for heat, I'm not noticing a huge difference in it, but I haven't measured it. I should expect a huge difference since most of the heat comes from the processor and not the drives. They're spun down for the most part so they're not the big heat generator. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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