- REVIEW OWC AURA PRO INSTALL
- REVIEW OWC AURA PRO DRIVER
- REVIEW OWC AURA PRO UPGRADE
- REVIEW OWC AURA PRO PRO
- REVIEW OWC AURA PRO SOFTWARE
Once complete, shut down your Mac and install the new SSD.Īfter installation, reconnect the external drive and hold down the Alt/Option key at startup to launch the startup manager.
REVIEW OWC AURA PRO SOFTWARE
Launch your cloning software of choice and clone the contents of your internal drive to the external drive. Make sure both the external drive and any newly created partitions are as big or bigger than the internal drive you wish to clone. Launch Disk Utility and erase the drive (as long as its contents are backed up elsewhere) or create a new partition to receive the cloned data from your internal drive. With this method, you’ll clone your drive to the intermediary drive, install the new SSD, then clone your data back from the intermediary drive to the new SSD.Ĭonnect a USB, FireWire, or Thunderbolt external hard drive to your rMBP.
REVIEW OWC AURA PRO PRO
If the Envoy Pro is not yet available, or if you simply don’t want to buy it, you can use a third external drive as an intermediary drive. Once the clone is complete, shut down the Mac, remove the OWC SSD from the Envoy Pro, and install it into the rMBP (discussed below). After that, the Envoy Pro can be purchased separately for US$59.95).īefore installation, insert the OWC SSD into the Envoy Pro, connect it to your Mac, and then use cloning software, such as Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to copy the stock internal drive’s contents to the new drive.
Luckily, OWC will soon offer the Envoy Pro, an external enclosure designed to accept the custom rMBP SSD ( Reviewer’s Note: OWC is offering to ship an Envoy Pro for free, once they are available, to every customer who purchases an Aura Pro SSD until September 30, 2012.
The SSD in the rMBP is a custom design, so most external enclosures won’t allow you to simply plug the drive in and connect it externally. Unless you wish to start with a clean install of OS X, most users will want to clone their existing drive contents over to the new SSD. This configuration syncs reads and writes with the SSD’s controller, allowing greater potential bandwidth than the standard SATA III bus. The flash memory used by OWC in the Aura Pro is synchronous NAND, as opposed to Asynchronous NAND. The OWC Aura Pro SSD (top) and the stock 256 GB Apple SSD (Bottom)
The Aura Pro actually contains 512 GB worth of flash components, but 32 GB is used for real-time data redundancy and error correction, leaving 480 GB of usable space. The Aura Pro’s 480 GB capacity is less than that of Apple’s 512 GB SSD, but for a good reason. In fact, enabling TRIM with OWC SSDs may actually decrease performance and reliability, and so the company recommends that customers leave TRIM disabled.) It is fully SMART compliant and supports TRIM if enabled from within OS X ( Reviewer's Update: While the drive does indeed support TRIM, OWC SSDs have built-in hardware-level "garbage collection" that maintains drive performance, meaning that users do not need to enable TRIM in their operating system. The Aura Pro is powered by a SandForce 2281 controller with 7 percent over provisioning to prevent performance degradation over time. The Aura Pro SSD includes everything you need to replace the SSD in the Retina MacBook Pro
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In this case, that’s a Pentalobe driver for the case screws and a Torx T–5 driver for the screw that holds the SSD in place inside the rMBP. Along those lines, the company includes all the tools you’ll need to perform the installation.
REVIEW OWC AURA PRO UPGRADE
Shortly after its release, tear-downs of the rMBP revealed both good and bad news: RAM was soldered to the system, and would not be user-upgradeable, but the internal SSD, despite its custom design, was removable and potentially upgradeable.Ībout two months after the rMBP’s release, Other World Computing (OWC), a longtime member of the Apple community and the first to release upgrades for many Macs with non-industry standard parts, released the Aura Pro, the first and thus far only third party SSD for the rMBP.Ĭurrently available in a single 480 GB capacity, the Aura Pro promises to increase rMBP storage speeds and provides a nice upgrade path for users who initially purchased their rMBP with a stock 256 GB drive and are now looking for more space.Īs mentioned above, OWC has been serving the Apple community since 1988, and they follow Apple’s “it just works” mentality. As Apple customers slowly stepped out of the “reality distortion field,” however, some were concerned that upgrading such a tightly-integrated beast would be impossible. When Apple announced the newly designed MacBook Pro with Retina Display (rMBP) at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, many marveled at the power and speed that a completely custom design could bring.
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