Nov 12, 2010 12:31 GMT  ·  By

Apricorn has come up with numerous storage offerings over the years, targeting various consumer segments, but they've really gone all out with their latest, that should make quite a lot of Mac Pro owners very happy. So, the company has just made available an Internal SSD RAID Array for Mac Pro, designed for high performance applications such as video editing and image processing, as it bridges the gap between the computer's high capacity, slow hard drive and system's RAM. In fact, according to Apricorn, the Mac Array's speedy SSD RAID takes over the Mac Pro's processing (acting as virtual memory) for a performance increase of up to 10 times, which is certainly nothing to look down to. Built around four high performance solid state drives on Apricorn's SATA PCIe Host Card (SATA II 3Gb/s speeds enabled), the Mac Array's form factor uses only one internal full length PCIe X4 slot, keeping the other slots and drive bays free for expansion. Fully configurable, the Mac Array can be used singularly or in tandem with a second or even third Mac Array for even greater performance. Moreover, the Mac Array comes pre-configured with the Mac BIOS and RAID 0 (striping) for maximum performance, the drives being already formatted. And since we've talked so much about the drives that make up this array, we'll have to mention that the storage solutions in question are all 128GB MLC WD SiliconEdge Blue 2.5" SATA Solid State Drives, each of them enabling up to 250 MB/s read and up to 170 MB/s write transfer rates, while going up to a whopping 760 MB/sec average read speed and 524 MB/sec average write speed with 4x SSDs. Apricorn's PCIe board with 4 MLC 128GB WD SSDs sells for somewhere in the vicinity of $1,499.00, which is indeed a pretty high sum, all things considered, but it's probably quite worth it, given the huge speed it provides for the Mac Pro.