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
Sequential Read/Write Speed
Using the latest build of Iometer I ran a 3 minute long 2MB sequential write test over the entire span of the drive. The results reported are in average MB/s over the entire test length:
Sequential write speed is completely unaffected by the drop in capacity. The 50GB $229 OWC Mercury Extreme performs just as well as the 100GB version from OWC or OCZ. The three also happen to be the fastest SSDs I've tested at this point in terms of sequential write speed.
Sequential read speed is also unaffected. There's absolutely no drop in performance here when you go to the smaller capacity. This is why OWC states that the 50GB drive performs just as well as the 100GB and 200GB drives. The next page will show you why that's a false statement.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link
I suspect within a month :)fic2 - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link
My calculator says that $229.99/50G = $4.5998 not $3.59. I think you divided by 64G instead of 50G.Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link
I did divide by 64GB :) I wanted to show the total cost per GB of NAND you were paying for. It's still used, even if it's not being exposed to your OS. It's also why I said that the situation gets worse when you look at available user space.Take care,
Annad
iwodo - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link
Thanks for clearing up. I think you should mention the drive have 64GB ( I dont think it is mentioned anywhere )Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, February 27, 2010 - link
Second paragraph after the last table on the front page, I mention that it has 64GB of MLC NAND :)Take care,
Anand
fic2 - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link
That is what I figured, but I still think it is strange - it is advertised as a 50G SSD so that is what I think the $/G should be based on. Kind of like saying a car is a 5 wheel vehicle because you have an unused spare in the trunk.ratbert1 - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link
...are there any reviews forthcoming on the Corsair Reactor or Nova drives? I heard the Reactors are out, don't know about the Nova.Mr Alpha - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link
Can I ask: what is the latest build of IOMeter?Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link
6-22-2008 build :)jimhsu - Sunday, February 28, 2010 - link
Right, you're using IOmeter. It shouldn't be hard to include maximum IO latency as a performance figure seeing as you already did so in the earlier SSD articles, i.e. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc...