OWC to Bring Aftermarket SF3700 PCIe SSD Upgrades to 2013 Macs
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 10, 2014 7:43 PM EST
I was pleasantly surprised to drop by OWC's booth at CES to see a mechanical sample of its forthcoming LSI SF3700 based PCIe SSD. OWC plans on offering aftermarket SF3700 SSD upgrades for all Haswell Macs and the late 2013 Mac Pro. Unlike OWC's SF-2xxx based upgrades, I'm hoping/expecting the SF3700 drives will be competitive in idle power consumption with the drives you get directly from Apple.
OWC will be producing these drives with the right proprietary connector for all of Apple's 2013 Macs with PCIe SSDs. We'll see x2 and x4 versions, just like what Apple offers today. As with other SF3700 vendors, we'll likely see Toshiba 19nm NAND used although OWC reminded me that they still buy some Micron NAND.
It's too early to talk about pricing, but I'd expect something a bit cheaper than Apple's upgrade costs (plus the fact that you get to keep the drive you bought your machine with).
The bad news is you'll have to wait until sometime in Q3 of this year to get the drives. OWC has historically been able to deliver SandForce based SSDs very quickly, so as soon as the firmware is production worthy I'm sure we'll see these drives on the market.
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swat671 - Saturday, January 11, 2014 - link
This might be a stupid question, but is it even possible to use multiple SSD's in the new Mac Pro and set them up in a RAID set up? Or would you have to use an external solution via Thunderbolt/USB?Ryan Smith - Saturday, January 11, 2014 - link
There's only one SSD interface on the Mac Pro. A second SSD (or any other kind of storage) has to be external.SirKnobsworth - Saturday, January 11, 2014 - link
More importantly, there aren't any more PCIe lanes left over for a second SSD, even if there's physically room for one. It would need another PLX chip.jameskatt - Sunday, January 12, 2014 - link
A RAID-0 SSD needs the chips to all be on the same card - or be in a daughter card like OWC's Accelsior PCIe SSD card.dreamer77dd - Saturday, January 11, 2014 - link
Apple problably made an agreement to be the only one aloud to sell the product so they can be first. Also Apple could ohf just said will buy every pci sdd in this form factor that you produce so no one else can have it. They get it for cheap, even if premium price till makes Apple look good.jameskatt - Sunday, January 12, 2014 - link
Nah. You're so funny. It is April Fool's yet?lesbedouins - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link
are every size (128, 256, 512 & 1024 Go) 4x aware ?Hrel - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link
OWN Trivia factoid: They're based out of this little shit town in Illinois called Woodstock. There's really no reason anyone should ever go there unless you own a farm. The building is almost entirely powered by a wind mill they set up on their property.Hrel - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link
OWC*Fucking hell I hate anandtech's comment section. Editing needs to be enabled and email alerts, AT LEAST ALERTS, need to be enabled.
pullman - Monday, January 20, 2014 - link
Great news.Btw, when will you review the 13" retina MBP?