OWC Extreme Pro SSD Flash drive for Mac

June 2015 – One of the best ways to improve the throughput and response time of the Mac books and other Mac models is to replace the standard rotating media HDD with an SSD. A long time leader in the SSD marketplace and one of the first suppliers in the Mac market OWC has made a big performance leap with their Extreme Pro series of drives. These devices run at a 6Gbps transfer rate which gives peak performance on an SATA interface and can provide sustained data rates up to 559MB/s Read, 527MB/s Write on Spec. In actual applications such as video editing and audio editing, we got into the low 500’s MB/s in our testing for both Read and Write.

OWC Extreme Pro 6G SSD for Mac & PC

These sustained speeds and throughput were a key criteria in becoming a Blackmagic Certified product. This Blackmagic Certification is for use on Blackmagic equipment including their Disk Recorders and Storage products the Blackmagic HyperDeck Studio & Blackmagic HyperDeck Shuttle as well the Blackmagic MultiDock Professional Cameras the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K and Blackmagic Cinema Camera. As a result of this certification, the OWC Extreme Pro 6G drives work for most 2K & 4K editing work flows.

The OWC SSDs are designed and assembled in the USA. All OWC drives uses controllers from SanForce. These provide best in class error correction (ECC) and utilize the SandForce RAISE™ (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) technology to provide RAID-like data protection and reliability without loss of transfer speed due to parity. The SandForce® Processor uses over-provisioning to maximize read and write performance to extend the overall reliability of the drive. The drives support advanced security protocols with 128/256-bit AES and TCG Opal compliance.

The OWC Extreme Pro 6G drives have a 5 yr warranty which is far longer than other SSDs in the market. This backing for the drives is on top of a low error rate on the drive. Video capture and editing applications rely on “guaranteed” capture of the data as many of the capture opportunities cannot be repeated. OWC addresses this need by utilizing synchronous NAND instead of the typical asynchronous NAND. Synchronous NAND enables reads and writes to be “synced” with the SSD processor’s clock signal for maximum data throughput and higher reliability on the storage of the data.