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OWC Mercury Accelsior and System Feel
There is something really striking about the responsiveness of the OWC Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD— certain apps just appear instantly on screen, as if by magic, as if they had already been running. And I already had very fast SSDs in place for my system prior to the Accelsior. While a few apps take a second or two to launch, that is because they do enough computation so that it takes time to start them even if the disk were infinitely fast (CPU speed becomes the bottleneck, the ultimate and ideal result of a system fully optimized for disk I/O and memory).
Soon I will be spec'ing all the MPG Pro Workstation builds with the 120GB or 240GB Accelsior by default; a product this exciting doesn’t come along very often.
I’ve already put one Accelsior into “production” as my Scratch drive (I work with numerous TIF and Photoshop files up to 8GB saved size, each, many of them). With the release of the 960GB Accelsior, I’ll move to having my Master volume on it.
(a compelling reason to favor a Mac Pro over an iMac!)
Ed F writes:
The recent posting for the PCI Express SSD you did, had me on the phone ordering the 240GB from OWC immediately. Once the card came in this weekend, it was time for some MacPro reconfiguration and installation of the Mercury Accelsior into my last open PCI port. The install went exactly as your blog screenshots illustrated. My next step was a fresh install of Snow Leopard and Photoshop CS6 (Beta) and my other essentials applications onto the card. The performance of the MacPro (4,1) was immediate and recognizable. This upgrade is not a tweak, but a significant improvement especially for heavy Photoshop users. My compliments for bringing the technology to my attention and for providing your viewers the benefit of pixel skills, from both behind the camera and in the digital darkroom.
DIGLLOYD: wonderful to hear these results.
