OWC Mercury Extreme SSD - First Look at a 50GB SandForce Drive
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 26, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
Update: Since the publication of this review OWC appears to have switched controllers for the Mercury Extreme SSD. The current specs look similar to that of SandForce's SF-1200 controller, not the SF-1500 used in the earlier drives. Performance and long term reliability (in an enterprise environment) are both impacted. For more information, read this.
With half the capacity of the 100GB Vertex LE we looked at last week, OWC's 50GB Mercury Extreme shows that while there is a performance drop with SandForce's SF-1500 50GB platform it is limited strictly to small file random write speed. Even with the performance drop, the drive is no slower than Intel's X25-M G2. And in sequential write performance it's still significantly faster.
As I mentioned in my Vertex LE review, the SandForce controller used in this drive is still largely unproven. OWC does offer a 5 year warranty on the drive, so presumably you'll be covered if something should happen to it - I would just recommend backing up regularly.
As a SSD, 50GB is enough for a notebook or a boot/applications drive assuming you don't have too many large applications. With more inherent spare area than any other consumer SSD on the market, the Mercury should be a bit more resillient as it approaches its full capacity. Despite a competitive price tag, this 50GB drive is easily the most expensive small capacity SSD you can buy in its class. Not in terms of overall price, but in terms of cost per GB. Intel's 80GB X25-M will give you around 50% more usable space for roughly the same price. You do get more performance out of the 50GB OWC drive, but with only 50GB of space it's really a tradeoff. If you only run one or two I/O intensive applications, then the 50GB drive may be best suited for you. If you run more than just a couple of apps, you may be better off with the Intel X25-M.
I am still unsure about the long term reliability of these drives based on SandForce's controller. It will take several months for me to get to a comfortable point with them. If you're fine with being an early adopter here, by all means go for it. If the capacity doesn't turn you off, the performance at first glance looks quite good.
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Kiru - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
I've bought a bunch of stuff from OWC (3 external Fire wire drives, and 18 gigs of memory), and had no issues with RMAs when I've needed to (the power supply for one of my externals died). I've had just as many issues with faulty product from New Egg as from anywhere else. But that refurb story IS definitely a pisser. I'm surprised they didn't work with you on that.mobilehavoc - Saturday, February 27, 2010 - link
It's pricey at $800 but still cheaper than the OCZ Vertex LE. I'll be running it in a Macbook with Snow Leopard so internal GC is a nice feature since no TRIM support.Any chance these will be upgradeable via firmware in the future? Or is it you buy the drive and that's it? I'm just nervous about buying something that may not be properly supported for times to come.
Di22yDucRydr1198 - Saturday, February 27, 2010 - link
Do any SSDs support this format which is starting to appear on some conventional HDDs? If one has an Advanced format HDD for storage and a SSD for OS and apps, will the two work together without a hitch?Why is that the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB falls off so dramatically on the 4k random write aligned to 512-byte sectors?
Thanks for your efforts on this and all the preceeding SSD articles.
Griswold - Sunday, February 28, 2010 - link
I dont think there needs to be advanced format compatibility with SSDs.hyc - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
And you're completely wrong. Advanced format brings similar benefits to SSDs as for HDDs. Not to mention that most SSDs are already using multiple-of-4KB erase blocks, so it actually has *more* benefit than for HDDs.Anand, your "aligned" random write result for the 50GB drive looks identical to your unaligned result. This looks like a test error to me. At worst, the difference in peak performance should be a factor of 2, due to using half as many channels in the 50GB drive vs the 100GB drive. I think you need to reformat that drive and repeat that test.
kunedog - Saturday, February 27, 2010 - link
At last we get an acknowledgement of the market prices of the G2 X-25M, now that they're finally where they were supposed to be at release. It only took six months for your predictions to come true!http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=36...">http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=36...
buzznut - Saturday, February 27, 2010 - link
There are a lot of comments here, so I don't expect this to be read. I am going under the assumption that the data for the Kingston SSD-v 40GB will be the same for the Intel 40GB drive. Many of us have purchased the Intel 40GB as a boot drive. Unfortunately I rarely see it in any benchmarks.I was wondering if there were any plans to do an article on raid performance. Also, are drive manufacturers planning on including trim support for raid at some point? Could we expect a firmware upgrade for this, or would it be for newer drives only?I understand that garbage collection is still available, but that's not the same is it?
I know that filling a drive to capacity is bad, but I have heard that one might leave anywhere from 10%-25% space available on a typical SSD. I have been paranoid about ruining the performance of my drive, so I have been running it at half capacity. Is there a sweet spot between capacity and performance on these smaller 40 GB drives?
Also would any of you recommend adding a second drive in raid 0? It seems to me to be an inexpensive way of adding capacity and performance without shelling out $200+ for a new higher capacity drive (which my wife will surely not approve). Again I am hesitant for the lack of trim support in raid. Will this require much more maintenance on the drive(s)?
greenguy - Saturday, February 27, 2010 - link
As another data point, I have 3 of these drives. I usually just read the kingston 40GB figure as it is the same drive. Performance degradation is something that increases as you read and write to the drive more. The less of this you do, the longer it will last in a near-virgin state.But yeah, I am interested in the questions you ask as well.
jimhsu - Saturday, February 27, 2010 - link
I'm curious about the unaligned vs aligned writes. How are these being set up: formatting NTFS with either 512 bytes or 4096 bytes allocation units? Or something else?Also, being an owner of a X25-M G2, I see that earlier generation drives don't have much variation between the two, while these new generation drives have dramatic variation. How does this translate into real-life performance metrics (i.e. the anandtech bench test)?Are there situations where failing to take advantage of aligned 4K leads to a severe performance impact, compared to the new drives?
semo - Saturday, February 27, 2010 - link
Any chance of seeing articles about PCI-E SSDs? Or are they not being talked about due to cost and/or lack of TRIM?