Like it does for the 15-inch model, OWC announced today it is offering its 480GB Mercury Aura Pro SSD for Apple’s new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. As noted by OWC, the $580 aftermarket upgrade option will cost you approximately $220 less than Apple’s comparable 512GB built-to-order upgrade, and will also allow you to keep your original base flash module. The press release (below) also said additional capacities would be available sometime in November, while an OWC Envoy Pro Enclosure for re using the factory flash module will be landing in December:

Available in 480GB capacity for immediate ordering and with additional capacities to be announced in November, the 6G (6Gb/s) SandForce Driven Mercury Aura Pro offers rMBP owners up to nearly 3x more storage and/or backup capacity than the factory 128GB flash module… In addition to offering significantly more capacity over the factory base 128GB SSD, the 480GB Mercury Aura Pro offers a $220 savings over the comparable sized 512GB factory capacity upgrade costing $800. Savings, however, aren’t always measured just in dollars. A key benefit for Apple notebook owners when choosing an OWC SSD is the retention of the original factory flash module.

The Mac Observer just benchmarked Parallels Desktop 8 against its main Mac Desktop virtualization competitor, VMware Fusion 5.

Both applications were configured to virtualize Windows on a 2011 27-inch iMac running on OS X 10.8.1 at 3.4 GHz with 16 GB of RAM for this showdown. The comparison specifically measured their ability to handle the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8 Pro.

Check out the results below: 

The conclusion:

From a purely performance-based perspective, Parallels has won this year’s competition of virtualization software on OS X. The good news for consumers, however, is that Fusion is not far behind in most categories and, while Parallels is indeed faster, Fusion is often fast enough for common tasks.

You can get Parallels 8 here or VMware Fusion 5 here.

Go to The Mac Observer for the full breakdown and more graphs.