When the cloud is not enough, Mercury Electra 960GB SSD will do
Summary: When you have a lot of stuff and need an SSD, this new drive is the one for you with almost a terrabyte of storage.
We hear a lot about the cloud but for some only the security of local storage will do. Some of these folks have a lot to store locally so the speedy solid-state disk (SSD) has been out of the question. The folks at OWC want to let those folks know that its new SSD is available in a capacity of a whoppying 960GB.
That's almost a terabyte of storage for the speedy Mercury Electra 3G SSD. This 2.5-inch drive will work with both Macs and PCs, and claims a fast 250 MB/second read/write time to meet bandwidth needs.
This SSD drive is not cheap at almost $1,300, but it's one of the biggest SSD drives available. It is available now from Other World Computing online at Macsales.
Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.
Talkback
Impractical
WD offers an external 2TB 2.5" drive for around $180. Mechanical, yes, but USB3.0 connectivity allows for R/W transfer rates that won't feel slow at all for a notebook/netbook.
BTW: Typo James - it's terabyte!
What if price is significantly reduced?
What is this? The monthly OWC promotion disguised as a news story?
Maybe someone in the business community could find a use for such an SSD, some place with an unlimited budget for such things, but I doubt even that application is in any way practical, or worthy of consideration.
Write to us about something relevant, please, not this spammish fluff.
Sour grapes that you cannot afford it?
PERIOD!
"so your story is basically for no one that I can think of on this planet at this time."
I live current reside on Mars and the year here is 1994. :)
Some may have missed the subtle dilemma posed by this article.
James could have written about any maker's SSD device. He chose an SSD sold thru OWC. And his blog info on that device might help some readers make a future purchase decision.
However, perhaps James could have chosen a better blog topic angle than just noting the increase in current SSD storage capacity. He might have offered an opinion on whether it makes more sense to upgrade or to buy a new system.
BTW, I'm almost at a point where I am contemplating that age old dilemma with my 2010 iMac computer. (In 2010, I purchase a fully decked out, state-of-the-art 27" iMac with a core i7, 256 SSD primary and a 2 TB secondary internal drives coupled to 16 GB of RAM (not Apple's RAM - I'm not completely fiscally irresponsible! Grin.)
But now, my primary boot drive "only" has 76 GB of SSD storage left after two years and my secondary drive has "just" 610 GB left from it's original 2 TB initial state.
OWC offers a "Turn Key" program where I could upgrade my SSD drive to a 480 GB unit (while keeping my 256 GB SSD as an external storage drive) and upgrading my secondary drive to a 4 TB unit for roughly $1,300 dollars.
I know that sounds like an outrageous amount of money to upgrade a system with those components to my PC friends but I really have enjoyed the speed of my system and it's crystal clear 2560 x 1440 27" display. I wouldn't mind spending the money if that means my iMac is given a few more years of useful video editing service. (You can't imagine just how much SSD space is needed - or appreciated - in doing video editing work.)
Or ... I could spend a little bit more and upgrade that system by purchasing a new "maxed out" MacBook Pro retina laptop. (I can afford it) And then, I could use my "old" iMac as a secondary monitor coupled with it's 24" Samsung monitor into a three monitor video editing system.
Then again, the $3000 I save by going to plan A and just upgrading the internal storage of my iMac system could be spent on other things - for example - a prosumer HD camcorder, for instance.
Decisions .. Decisions.
But you see, that is the dilemma with updating computer hardware. Personally, when I was younger and into the PC ecosystem, I played the individual component "upgrade game" (graphic cards, HD's, RAM, various I/O cards) but when I switched to the Mac ecosystem, I bought the high end systems and used those systems longer. When the time came, I simply bought a newer system for my upgrade needs. I know each philosophy has it's pros and cons but I now tend to favor the "wait a little longer between upgrade cycles" and then buy the state of the art system rather than upgrading piecemeal thru individual components.
PC upgrades limited to storage, graphics or MB+CPU+RAM
Mind you, in the XP days that was a real PITA of driver searching. However, when my old Win7 920 system went south, a day of research for matching components, a trip to a local PC shop and an afternoon had my system fully operational as an i7 with 12GB RAM without having to deal with drivers at all.