OWC’s Data Doubler Review

Decided to upgrade my Mac Book Pro 13″ mid-2009 [Unibody 5.5] with some extra memory and Raid storage. OWC’s Data Doubler bracket makes it possible to install a 2nd hard drive where the optical drive is…since I don’t remember the last time I’ve used it…perfecto!

The price of SSDs is still out of this world and it didn’t make sense to me to spend that kind of cash in an upgrade of what is now an ‘old’ Powerbook, so decided on two Western Digital 750Mb Scorpio Black. These are fast drives and my faithful 3.5″ desktop Scorpio Black hasn’t failed me yet [check a comprehensive review at TechReport ].

The problem was to find the stuff on this side of the pond, for about the same price. After googling around for a bit I bumped into a website that pointed me to these guys: Macupgrade. A quick email to check their reaction time and stock, placed the order on-line and got the package 3 days later with everything well packed and in original condition. It was faster and costed less than ordering directly from OWC and these guys have a lot of OWC’s stuff right here, so very convenient indeed.

Back to the Data Doubler, what can I say…it’s a good product, the holes for the screws fit perfectly, no hard edges, the manual is very good with detailed step-by-step instructions for each model and it comes all the tools you need to install the bracket. Since the disk is secured to the bracket by 2 screws, it’s not vibration damped as the main hard disk bay which uses rubber grommets. Of course this is not really a problem for SSD’s but for normal HD’s it might be, especially when there is a lot of vibration around and both disks are in a Raid 0 configuration [also known as sky-diving without a parachute, backup often…]! But so far, so good…

A couple of things that might be useful and that are not mentioned in the installation manual:

a) Disconnecting the camera cable from the logic board is really a delicate step. There is a small plastic tab glued to the logic board that you should remove first so that it’s easier to disconnect and reconnect the cable later [don’t worry, it is not hard glued and can be placed back afterwards]. It’s located here:

MBP13 with OWC Data Doubler installed

b) The bottom case of the MPB 13″ mid-2009 only has long screws [13.5mm] and 3mm screws but the MBP 13″ mid-2010 has [apparently!] also shoulder screws [also 3mm] which are slight different from the other 3mm screws. Their positions are shown below along with the correct tightening sequence to avoid wobbling.

I cloned my existing hard disk [a Seagate Momentus 7200.4, already slightly better than the 5400rpm stock HD it came with] using the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner shareware, booted from an external USB disk, formatted and partitioned each of  HDs alike and using Apple’s Disk Utility created Raid 0 volumes [with 128k block size] from the respective partitions [hint: if Disk Utility says that the 1st raid volume is busy when trying to create the second, unmount the first!]. This is software raid so there is a processing overhead involved, still the overall performance is a lot better. The downside of having 2 HDs is higher power consumption and reduced battery autonomy, worth it in my case.

Xbench performance results:

Disk:    Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500Gb			Disk: 	WD Scorpio Black 7200 750Gb Striped Raid
Disk Test	44.84					Disk Test	136.74
Sequential	94.15					Sequential	156.40
Uncached Write	110.85	68.06 MB/sec [4K blocks]	Uncached Write	346.80	212.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write	156.67	88.65 MB/sec [256K blocks]	Uncached Write	316.81	179.25 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read	60.80	17.79 MB/sec [4K blocks]	Uncached Read	58.30	17.06 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read	94.04	47.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]	Uncached Read	419.58	210.88 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random	29.43						Random	121.48
Uncached Write	9.07	0.96 MB/sec [4K blocks]		Uncached Write	52.28	5.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write	154.00	49.30 MB/sec [256K blocks]	Uncached Write	520.42	166.61 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read	81.27	0.58 MB/sec [4K blocks]		Uncached Read	144.32	1.02 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read	146.77	27.23 MB/sec [256K blocks]	Uncached Read	201.96	37.47 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Power (W) from Manufacturer				Power (W) from Manufacturer
	Seek,Typical:	1.554					Read/Write:	1.75x2
	Idle, Typical:	0.67					Idle:		0.8x2

 

Update: the good folks at Macupgrade are giving a 10% discount to readers of the blog.

Enter the following code before completing your order: macupgradesantos

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