OWC releases Mac-compatible Mercury SSD firmware updater
Firmware updaters for SSD devices have required the use of Microsoft Windows, but Other World Computing has released a new updater for its drives that can run without Windows.
Mac upgrade vendor Other World Computing is the manufacturer of the popular Mercury line of SSD upgrades that many Mac users have installed on their systems. Early revisions of the drives have had firmware issues that resulted in problems with some machines being put into sleep mode. In late January, OWC tweaked the firmware to address this problem; however, until now the firmware updaters have been Windows-based applications.
As a result, if you have an early revision of these SSD drives and have been experiencing sleep problems, without Boot Camp or without removing the drive from your system and installing it on a Windows PC then there was no way to upgrade the firmware. OWC has changed this by releasing a firmware updater that does not require Windows, so Macs with these drives should be able to update the firmware and address the sleep issues.
The updaters are available on OWC's site as a disk image that is compatible with multiple Mac systems (there are three separate images available, for MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, and iMac/MacBook Air systems). Download and burn the image to a DVD, and then boot off it to load the updater's GUI. The update does not run in OS X, but does not require Windows anymore.
While SSD devices from other manufacturers will not accept these specific updates, if you have installed an OWC SSD drive on your Mac then these updaters should bring your drive to the latest firmware version. To check the firmware version of your OWC SSD drive, open the System Profiler (or System Information in Lion), and click the "Serial-ATA" section under "Hardware." Then select the OWC drive and check the revision number. If the revision number is not either 361A13F0, 360A12F0, or 360A13F0, then your firmware version is out of date and you may benefit from updating.
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