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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
74 Comments
View All Comments
ayembee - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 - link
...given my 200GB Vertex 2 LE lasted 6 days :however, based on the OCZ support forums it could be the OCZ firmware rather than a specific hardware issue, as it seems they they are getting very similar-sounding bricks on several kinds of vertex models.
Hrel - Sunday, March 7, 2010 - link
Now I only need to wait for SSD's in this price range to drop under $1 per GB; and let me add that after getting used to 12cents per GB I think I'm being extremely generous!OWC Grant - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
As far as reselling review units, most manufacturers DO sell their review units and other products clearly marked as "open box", B stock, or refurbished and thus provide users with another purchase option. We offer these types of products in our monthly "clearance/garage sale" promo and are very well liked by our newsletter readers as great "insider" deals.Our statement of all the drive sizes (50/100/200GB) offering the same performance in terms of raw sustained data transfer rates was and is still true. As noted in Anand's final summary and direct communication with us, the overall performance of the 50GB model "looks quite good" and "performance is nearly identical in call cases except one." (a small random write file) We are looking into that one instance and will advise on any outcome.
Thanks as always to Anand and you readers for your interest in SSD's in general and our offerings in that category.
jed22281 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
"As noted in Anand's final summary and direct communication with us, the overall performance of the 50GB model "looks quite good" and "performance is nearly identical in call cases except one." (a small random write file) We are looking into that one instance and will advise on any outcome."So what was the outcome?
Thank-you.
skimike - Monday, May 3, 2010 - link
Out of curiosity, do you know if OWC has a secure/sanity erase utility for the OWC Mercury Extreme 100GB drive? I called OWC's tech support line and they didn't know anything about it. And the drive password used by hdparm in Linux isn't set to NULL so I can't use hdparm, either.monomer - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Dailytech posted an article on Friday saying that JMicron will be releasing a new controller with a 128MB DRAM cache soon. Does anyone know if they actually fixed their random access problems, or did they just throw more cache at it to try to cover it up?tuskers - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Something I'd love to see is how much software compile times improve with an SSD. As a professional software engineer, I'd love to see whether SSDs would improve a common real-world task like this.hyc - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Yes, noticeably.I write code all day. All of my machines now have SSDs as their primary drive. 256GB G.Skill Titan in my desktop, 256GB Samsung in my current laptop, 128GB Transcend PATA in my old laptop, 120GB OCZ CoreV2 floating on an eSata adapter for quick bulk copies.
arklab - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Pardon my ignorance, but I'm new to SSD's.I (think) I read in your first review that only Sand Force is able to make utilities for these (OWC and OCZ LE) drives.
Does this include the trim command (for Windows 7 use), or can we just use some "generic" command?
What would OSX users do?
Thanks!
fictionfree - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
I've purchased a couple items from OWC in the past - can't say I'm a fan of the company. It wouldn't surprise me if they resold review drives. I purchased an external Firewire drive from them a few years ago, and when the internal drive died, I took the case apart to see that it was a refurbished drive. I didn't buy a refurb drive, I bought a brand new drive - but they filled the case with a refurb. Not cool - and they refused to do anything to make it right.Just my 2 cents, but I find them to be shady.