REVIEW: OWC Aura SSD 2TB Upgrade for 'late 2013' Mac Pro
Originally posted January 9th, 2015 by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist
Other World Computing has a flash storage upgrade for your 'late 2013' Mac Pro. Apple sells the Mac Pro with a choice of 256G, 512G, or 1TB internal flash modules. How would you like to have Two Terabytes (2TB) of flash storage inside your Mac Pro? Meet the Aura SSD.
GRAPH LEGEND
Aura SSD 2TB = OWC Aura SSD inside the 'late 2013' Mac Pro
Factory 1TB = Apple factory flash module inside 'late 2013' Mac Pro
Factory 512G = Apple factory flash module inside the 'late 2013' Mac Pro
Factory 256G = Apple factory flash module inside the 'late 2013' Mac Pro
RED graph bar means the fastest overall in Megabytes per Second.
LARGE SEQUENTIAL TRANSFER TEST
We used AJA System Test to test file level sequential transfer speed using a 16GB test document.
SMALL RANDOM TRANSFER TEST
We used a range of 4K to 1024K blocks in the Standard Random test in QuickBench as a predictor boot volume 'house keeping' performance and a simulation of an application that does multiple small random transfers.
INSIGHTS
The big story here is that the Aura SSD offers internal storage expansion for the 'late 2013' Mac Pro beyond what the Apple factory offers.
The benchmark results above obviously show that the Aura SSD for Mac Pro is not as fast as the factory flash storage (except when it comes to small random reads). Yet when it comes to real world pro apps like DaVinci Resolve, exporting and playback functions we tried produced the same elapsed times as the factory flash blade. That's because those functions are CPU and/or GPU bound.
If an extremely fast storage transfer function is required, no matter what internal flash option you choose, you can get even faster speeds with the Thunderbolt 2.0 storage solutions like the OWC Accelsior_E2/Helios 2 expansion and the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2.0.
NOTE: You can continue to use your factory flash blade in the OWC Envoy Pro USB 3.0 bus powered enclosure.
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WHERE TO BUY THE AURA SSD for MAC PRO
Preorder the Aura SSD directly from Other World Computing in either 1 Terabyte or 2 Terabyte capacities.
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