In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that I’ve personally purchased and used products from Other World Computing (OWC). I first ran into them when I was looking to upgrade my PowerBook G4 with a SuperDrive and they were one of the few companies who were offering Apple OEM models that would work perfectly with iMovie and iDVD.

Today, OWC is much more than a simple parts supplier. They have a host of solutions from hardware, software, to user replaceable batteries. More than enough to satisfy the handy Mac craftsman that’s inside you. If you know what a T6 driver is, then OWC products are totally for you.

If you don’t, that’s okay. If you’re looking to save some money by doing it yourself rather than sending your Mac in for repairs, OWC will (8 out of 10 times) have the solution you’re looking for.

Their website is easy to navigate and holds a ton of handy information to help you with your weekend project.

At MacWorld Expo, OWC showed me some of their newest products, including USB 3.0 external enclosures, external blu-ray burner and SSD upgrade for your MacBook.

While other’s are touting USB 3.0 support in their enclosures, OWC is happy to show their enclosure with full internal USB 3.0 electronics. 3.0 external boards a little scarce right now, but OWC will have those when they’re more available in the next few months.

Also on the floor was a blazing fast external 12x blu-ray burner that’s bundled with Toast, available now for around $375 (or no Toast for $350, so get the one with Toast). Works perfectly with Mac if you want to make a copy of a blu-ray disc that you own and playback on PS3 or other blu-ray player.

Everything will work on your Mac, but since there’s not blu-ray burn support yet, you’ll need to use Toast or some other burning app. Otherwise, it works perfectly for playback, burning DVD’s, and reading data.

Next OWC rolls out a power adapter with built in battery. About as big as a MacBook AC adapter, the NuPower Charge & Sync provides you with a one stop cord solution for iPod and iPhones. The unit plugs into the wall and recharges itself as as any device plugged into it’s USB port. So it could recharge anything from cell phones to iPods and whatever else draws power from a USB port. Really snappy design and simple to use. Unfortunately, no pricing details were available when I stopped by. We’ll be sure to update when we get them.

Finally, the last product I looked at from OWC is their laptop sized SSD. Perfect to replace your internal old school mechanical drive on your MacBook, OWC offers it’s own branded solution touted as the fastest on the market.

I don’t know about fastest on the market, but I can tell you, this thing smokes. Boot-ups, app opening, everything is faster on an SSD. No moving parts, instant addressing and fast reads and writes all equate to some awesome performance on your MacBook.

You’ll pay a price though, SSDs are much more expensive with OWC’s version coming in at $229.99 for 50GB and up to around $780 for 200GB. Compare that with a SATA drive of 320GB at around $80-$90 (or less if it’s on sale) and you get the point.

Still, the tradeoff here is pure performance. If you gotta have it, and you know it if you gotta have it, it’s worth the extra duckets.

Two MacBook Pros, everything equal except for one with SSD and one with standard 5400rpm HDD. HDD MacBook gets rebooted first. As soon as the Apple logo shows up, the SSD MacBook gets rebooted. While the SSD equipped MacBook Pro boots and opens up 4 Adobe CS4 apps, the other MacBook is lugging along.

If you need this type of performance, then this is the drive for you. For me, I don’t need it, but I could sure use a 50GB SSD boot drive and then use a cheaper external storage solution (also from OWC) for my data and file storage.

It’s an awesome solution.

Quality products, reasonable (if not really good) prices, OWC is worth checking out if you’re used to going to other retail shops (on-line or otherwise) for your Mac gear. These guys know what they’re doing and you can rest assured that it works on your Mac like they say.

Check them out at www.macsales.com

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