Hard Disk Drive Replacement Options

You're right.

Anyone know who makes OWC brand SSDs? My assumption has always been that it's a re-packaged SSD made by someone else. To the best of my knowledge OWC is a reseller, not a manufacturer.

Have you considered asking OWC?

About the only way you could determine that would be to disassemble a number of SSDs and see whose SSD card layout, chips, and controllers are identical or near identical to those used in OWC. A long time ago I did EMI work and to evaluate sources of interference we had to disassemble units to get to the circuit boards. As an example, one ink jet printer being sold by HP, Tektronix, and Compaq (this was long before HP bought Compaq) were all identical, and all sourced from a manufacturer in Taiwan. All the manufacturers did was repackage the circuity and do their own manuals, drivers, etc.

Personally I would suspect one of the lesser known brands like Mushkin or Kingston, but there are so many cropping up it's hard to tell. With OWC having an annual income in the tens of millions of dollars and 137 employees, I doubt they have capability to do hardware development. They likely sought out someone that could do it for them or someone looking for business solicited them the idea. That doesn't mean it's bad, though. This is a frequent practice in manufacturing.

ZV137 wrote:

...Personally I would suspect one of the lesser known brands like Mushkin or Kingston, but there are so many cropping up it's hard to tell. With OWC having an annual income in the tens of millions of dollars and 137 employees, I doubt they have capability to do hardware development. They likely sought out someone that could do it for them or someone looking for business solicited them the idea. That doesn't mean it's bad, though. This is a frequent practice in manufacturing.

That's what I thought, and it makes sense. I always saw OWC as essentially a third party parts retailer, not designer or manufacturer.

It's really most of them swapping out stuff like that. An HDD required dedicated facilities to make the actual parts because of the nature of the high precision electromechanical drive components. The same isn't true for SSDs. For example, SanDisk uses some of their own controllers, some SandForce controllers, and I think some others as well. OCZ uses a ton of different controllers, depending on the model number. Most of the "big" companies, like Intel, make and design their own.

Manufacturers are swapping components out all the time. For example there was some brew-ha-ha about Kingston and PNY replacing the NAND flash types in their SSDs with a lower performance chip, and yet the model numbers remained the same.

This is a good example of what may go on in production:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184253-ssd-shadiness-kingston-and-pny-caught- bait-and-switching-cheaper-components-after-good-reviews

If you read the article, especially the second paragraph on PNY, basically they completely changed the controller. On an SSD that's just about the equivalent of putting an entirely different SSD in.

Toshiba, Samsung (840/850), Crucial and Intel all have good reps.

Others may too, but as noted, some don't.

One of the ways you may be able to tell if the company making an SSD is a "serious" player is whether or not they develop their own controllers. SanDisk, when they first entered the market started off using Marvel and Sandforce controllers, but now they apparently make their own. I would say they classify as a decent SSD maker as well, plus they're low in cost.

Another way to tell if an SSD player is "serious" is go to their web site and see how much information they have on their units. If all they have are a few brief tech notes they're likely nickel and dimeing it to save money, and my experience has been that if they're short on documentation, if you have problems they'll be short on skilled tech support too.

Some of the sale type websites allow you to filter SSDs based on the controller you use. Companies like Samsung, Intel, Crucial/Micron, Toshiba, and now even SanDisk will use their own. Some of these other companies are all over the place. OCZ for example, has used nearly every controller manufacturer to date. I assume since they're now owned by Toshiba that will stop. I'd just steer clear of some of these lesser known brands. They're probably just repackagers. It would also probably explain their poor documentation.

One of the Kingston's was apparently a repackaged Intel (X-18?). There are a ton of drives that were Sandforce controllers a few years ago.

Here's another company selling Mac parts with their own "brand" of SSD:

http://store.mcetech.com/mm/merchant.mvc?Store_Code=mtos&Screen=CTGY&Category_Co de=PCIEFLASH

As you can see from the pictures it has the letters "MCE" right on the PCIe SSD.

I suspect the source may be Transcend.