OWC announces portable, bus-powered external SSD drives

I have purchased from OWC three times. Two of those turned out badly. Mostly because their customer service seem to be, "We have your money, now stop bothering us." I intend to go to an SSD external for back-ups, but I will never purchase anything from OWC again and cannot recommend it to anyone else. As long as everything goes well, no problem, but if you need service, you'll be very sorry.

>> Um, where can you buy a FW 400/800 bus-powered portable 64MB cache 1TB platter drive for $99? I'd like that. The best I've seen for $99 for a bus-powered portable right now is a USB 2.0 5400rpm 500GB with a 16MB cache.

The operative takeaways in this post are: 1) external, 2) back-up.

This is not about having an internal SSD.

That's what this device is. An external back-up. Therefore, the bus, RPM issue is not relevant for back-up. Who really cares if back-up is 20% faster? Is it worth spending ten times as much? If you answer yes, then I congratulate you on having a salary which allows for extravagant spending in exchange for minimal performance gain.

I back up my stuff at night.

It can take longer or shorter. I don't care.

If it takes 25 minutes, instead of 20 minutes, I'm still snoozing.

And likely I'm snoozing more peacefully knowing I have $700 in my bank account that was not spent on frivolity.

And I still dispute this urban myth/old developer's tale that "SSDs are more durable than platter drives." That SOUNDS reasonable, but has anybody actually tested it? Dropped similar drives from two feet? Four feet? Six feet? Carried both drives around for a week in a laptop bag, luggage, messenger bag?

I'm skeptical that the one reason -- durability -- which allows these devices to even enter into the conversation is valid. That'd be something for TUAW to do. Test the hypothesis about SSD's "superior" durability.

>> While SSD drives are still more expensive than traditional hard drives, they're definitely more rugged, and in the long run that might be less costly than replacing a dropped hard drive.

Thou sayest.

Is it true?

>> It's gotta start somewhere.

Fantastic. Then let me be the first to thank you personally for spending excessive amounts of money in the service of eventually bringing SSD technology down to the realm of reasonable pricing. Your sacrifices are not in vain.

Of course, I won't be joining you on your quixotic quest, nor will the vast majority of other consumers.

All sarcasm aside WHY does it "gotta start somewhere?" You are suggesting SSD is an inevitable progression? Often technologies priced far above their value simply perish a worthy death, never to be heard from again. Paging Betamax. Paging minidisc. If 30-to-1 dollars-to-gigabytes and a slight edge in durability over platter drives is SSD's argument for inclusion, then I say don't let the door hit your ass on the way down the elevator chute.

Gotta admit the prices for solid state drives are utterly ridiculous.

What bothers me is the fact that it's using FW400/800. SSD sequential read and write speeds are bottle capped by the direct SATA II interface... why would you want to use FW800 on an external SSD? I say might as well buy a 1 TB external.

As for boot drives, well that's a different story. I can tell a HUGE difference when transferring files from Drive Bay 1 to Drive Bay 2 in my Mac Pro.

Wow! A 256GB drive costs more than 12 years worth of BackBlaze service, and I get to do the work of remembering to plug it in and run a Time Machine backup? Hmmm....

Not saying this drive doesn't have some great uses (Bet it's pretty good for video, as far as portable external drives go), but backup doesn't seem to be one of the more logical uses of it.

Looks like a great product, but I can't for the life of me see myself using this thing on the bus.

This is SO ironic... I just upgraded my 120 GB [white] MacBook hard drive last night to 500 GB with an OWC on-the-go USB 2.0 kit to turn my original internal HD to an external HD with the enclosure similar to the one above. I also maxed out my RAM to 4 GB from 1 GB and have a totally new love interest with my MacBook. Having the extra 120 GB of storage sets me at ease since I know I have backup and don't have to fear losing any of my data!

I'm glad I followed my gut on this one... Thanks TUAW for the confirmation! ;~)

I used an SSD in my laptop for a while and went back to a hard drive. Reading is like 40% faster but writing is not really any faster. Hence, backup SSD? Kind of fail, hate to say.

I've got one of their enclosures for an old Macbook HDD, and I really like them a lot. As far as an SSD drive, I'll keep waiting for the prices to drop on those.

Thanks for the review, and it's good to know that other folks like the OWC enclosures as well!