We received a note from Tobias Brinkmann, head marketing honcho in the EMEA region, informing us that the company released eight new products in three lines. When it comes to the Apple platform and the price of memory upgrades on apple.com, we only have to address memory upgrade kits first.
DDR2 kits are intended for 1st Gen Intel-based Mac Book and Mac Book Pros, while DDR3 kits are intended for latest, nVidia-powered Mac Book / Mac Book Pros. Both are available in 2GB Single Channel SO-DIMM and 4GB Dual Channel kits.
DDR2 memory ticks at 667 MHz and 5-5-5-15 latencies at 1.8V, while DDR3 ticks at 1066 MHz [according to original OCZ’s spec sheet, the clock was 8500 MHz, but that is just a "bit" too high…], with 7-7-7-20 latencies at 1.5V. Given the fact that original DIMMs in one of our Mac Book Pros comes with DDR3-1066 CL9 memory, this memory upgrade should also increase the responsiveness, given the lower latencies.
Our guys in the studio took a trip to memory lane and remembered when replacing a bog standard PC133 memory module with Corsair’s PC150 CL2 would visibly increase the speed and reduce boot time by 5-10 seconds [Power Mac G4].
The last four products belong to 2.5" Vertex series, targeting all MacBooks sans the MacBook Air [MBA uses 1.8" drives]. OCZ launched 30, 60, 120 and 250GB SSD drives, all featuring 64MB of cache. Performance is equal to the PC-oriented Vertex series, with 240MB/s sequential read and 170MB/s sequential write, but sustained write varies from 70-100MB/s.
Also, we also noticed an interesting statement on the SSD’s product page: IMPORTANT NOTE: Solid State Drives DO NOT require defragmentation. It may decrease the lifespan of the drive.
For that, OCZ reserved 2-8GB of memory on every model, depending on the capacity. But still, reading that a defrag could cause a decrease of its lifespan won’t make developers of defragging utilities very happy. We’ll dig into it.
