Technology solutions provider Other World Computing (OWC) today announced newly lowered pricing on its line of Mercury Elite-AL Pro 800 RAID STRIPE FireWire 800/400 Solutions. In keeping with OWC’s mission of providing top-quality technology at the very best prices, price reductions include a best value 1.0 terabyte (TB) model at more than 10% off OWC’s already competitive pricing.
The OWC Mercury Elite-AL 800 Pro RAID Solution is the first Two Drive External FireWire 800/400 Drive with Hardware RAID available in capacities up to 1.5TB (1500GB). Fast and furious, with data transfer rates of over 80 Mbytes per second, this solidly built unit is compact too – only 9″ long x 2.8″ wide x 5.8″ in height!
High-reliability and exceptional performance results from utilization of the best hard disk mechanisms and a custom Oxford 912 chipset-based bridge solution. All Elite-AL models are tested and certified for Audio/Video, Music, Movies, Graphics, Digital Photography, Backup, and General Storage and have been EMC/Dantz Backup Certified for direct Retrospect support.
Elite-AL Pro 800 RAID Solutions provide (2) FW800 ports, (1) FW400 Port, and come packaged with FireWire 800 Cable, FireWire 400 Cable, EMC Retrospect Backup, Intech HD Speedtools utility suite, and more. The high capacity Mercury storage solutions are backed by an industry leading two year OWC Warranty.
Price reductions are:
• 160GB with 4MB of Data Buffer now $219.99
• 320GB with 16MB of Data Buffer was $259.99, now $249.99
• 400GB with 16MB of Data Buffer was $309.99, now $299.99
• 500GB with 16MB of Data Buffer was $319.99, now $309.99
• 640GB with 16MB of Data Buffer now $369.99
• 800GB with 16MB of Data Buffer was $549.99, now $539.99
• 1.0TB with 16MB of Data Buffer was $759.99, now $679.99
• NEW 1.5TB with 32MB of Data Buffer was $1149.99, now $1099.99
Visit: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/RAID/
Also available, Elite-AL Pro 800 RAID Dual Drive Enclosure Kits for $119.99.
Visit: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MEFW912AL2/
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Problem with Firewire 800 is that it’s only mostly on PowerMac G5 machines and it has only one port.
Since one will have to invest in a Firewire 800 PCI card to get more ports, one to each drive for maximum performance, why bother when SATA PCI and external SATA drives are so much faster?
Firewire 800 drives are good if you have to move from machine to machine or just need a few external drives without having to invest in a PCI card for more ports.
Firewire 800 would be wonderful if Apple included more ports.
Another compliant is the video iPods should have a extra Firewire port for those millions of us that have Firewire. USB 2 is the slowest POS interface, it takes hours and hours to fill a iPod with video.
Also the “Oxford 912 chipset-based bridge solution.” has caused problems with OS updates.
With these drives you have to update the driver software before hooking up to a OS to a more recent version.
So when OS X 10.5 is released, one has to wait for the drivers to be updated before hooking up these drives to a 10.5.
Numerous problems with this chipset and Tiger.
I rather not have to update driver software, it’s so “Windows”.
I have two 250GB external drives on my G5. Available to my G5.
The Firewire drive is more accessible and more reliable. I can usually get a file copied to it faster than to the other.
The ‘other’ is a SAN (or is that NAS?) disk – connected via Ethernet to my LAN and available to any system on that LAN. If you know the password for the ‘share’, that is. My various systems lose connectivity to it a couple times a week, but that is easy enough to fix … just annoying. And it spends more time spun down than the FireWire drive does.
I’ll be staying with the SAN option for future external drive purchases. Sure, RAID would be an upgrade, but availability is key. My iBook can’t ‘see’ my G5’s FireWire drive. I can access the SAN storage from anywhere in the house and still have a bit extra security on the storage.
DLMeyer,
If you set up the sharing right your iBook will see the firewire drive just fine – I can see all of my internal drives as well as external drives on my network – I do agree that a network drive is easier though..
So what does this group think about mirrored FireWire Raid storage vs. NAS (Network Archived? Storage) solutions? NAS seems to be growing in popularity with Home Theater owners…At AVS Forums.com, several manufacturer’s NAS systems are PC & Mac-compatible — and well-regarded…
These price cuts are a joke … $10 reduction on a $260 product? That’s less than a 4% discount.
The 320MB drive went from 81 cents per gigabyte to 78 cents a gigabyte. Even at 78 cents per gigabyte, this is still 1.5x to 2x the price obtainable elsewhere.
OWC makes decent products, but they are consistently overpriced.
Even after these supposed price reductions.
Hey, Overpriced, where can you get RAID for 40 cents a GB? FireWire HDs? Sure … you can do that. RAID? Haven’t seen that – or Network drives, for that matter – much below a dollar a GB.
Now … a 4% price cut is worth mentioning, but a couple hundred words seems a bit much for a “mention”. I hope MDN will be getting some sort of “consideration” in return.
whatever, I just took a look at what I can mount on my wife’s iMac from my PM, and the external drive wasn’t among the options. What do you need to do, set up an alias to the drive and leave it on the desktop? A bit cludgey, but it could work.
So we’re back to shilling for OWC on a weekly basis?
Shameless and unethical to disguise it as news