3 stars and here is why.
By Brian
Rated 3 out of 5
Date: 2022-11-12
Why oh why do I trust OWC? Every SSD I have ever owned from OWC has ended in disappointment. The 2.5 models that didn't have TRIM years and years ago! The 4TB internal for the 2013 Mac Pro that just died one day. Then, this thing! The good news is: it does have a nice size and form factor. The bad news is: it comes with an 8.9GB boot volume that forces you to use an installer app to expose the full 250GB capacity. That would be fine, except for two things: (1) I don't want to be marketed one year of malware protection, and I was, and (2) the installer failed 3x in a row on an Apple Silicon MBP with macOS 13 Ventura. I had to bust out an old Intel MBP to use the installer. Then, once I had selected APFS as the file system, the installer finished and I began using this drive on my Apple Silicon MBP. Good until, wait for it, I tried to use Disk Utility to reformat it for exFAT, because I changed my mind. Well, wouldn't you know it, but Disk Utility won't let me format it for exFAT! Only APFS now! Hmmm. Such a strange product. Performance-wise, it's ok. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test shows an average write speed of 550MB/second and average read speed of 550MB/second. While that's a far cry from the 950MB/second advertised, it's still pretty decent. Perhaps the 950MB/second is obtainable with a different file system such as exFAT, HFS+, or NTFS, but I certainly wouldn't know as I am unable to reformat it to anything else besides NTFS. All-in-all, it's an OWC product and all that entails. OWC is NOT a manufacturer of NAND chips. They merely put other people's chips in pretty packaging and it shows. It shows in the gacky installer program, the lack of finesse in software, and clumsy instructions. Perhaps their phone support is helpful. It certainly was years ago when other OWC products I had experienced failures. But, then, and most likely now, the solutions to these problems are out of their hands, because OWC is a repackager, not a manufacturer. I hate to do this to you guys, but this is a 3 star product, at best. If it weren't for the inconvenience of having to deal with bad USB-C and USB-A cables that die from time-to-time, and also just the hassle of having to remember to carry those cables in my backpack, I probably wouldn't even bother with this all-in-one device. But, alas, cables are sometimes easy to forget, and even when remembered, they do have failures, too. So, all things considered, I like this thing well enough to keep it. But, the notion that it's unable to be reformatted with a different file system than the one initially chosen is just really epically bad design.
