| OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Storage | |
| Written by Olin Coles | |
| Monday, 01 August 2011 | |
|
Page 5 of 11
AS-SSD BenchmarkAlex Schepeljanski of Alex Intelligent Software develops the free AS SSD Benchmark utility for testing storage devices. The AS SSD Benchmark tests sequential read and write speeds, input/output operational performance, and response times. Because this software receives frequent updates, Benchmark Reviews recommends that you compare results only within the same version family. Beginning with sequential read and write performance, the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G Solid State Drive produced 503.62 MB/s read speed, and 238.51 MB/s write performance. Because this benchmark uses compressed data, sequential file transfer speeds are reported lower than with other tools using uncompressed data. For this section, we will concentrate on the operational IOPS performance using compressed data. Single-threaded 4K IOPS performance delivers 13.78 MB/s read and 64.55 MB/s write, while the 64-thread 4K reads recorded 187.41 MB/s and write performance was 191.55 MB/s.
AS-SSD 64-thread 4KB IOPS performance results are displayed in the chart below, which compares several enthusiast-level storage products currently on the market. In these 64-thread 4KB IOPS performance tests the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G outperformed other SSDs and kept pace with the OCZ Vertex 3. The chart is sorted by total combined performance, which helps to illustrate which products offer the best operational input/output under load:
In the next section, Benchmark Reviews tests transfer rates using ATTO Disk Benchmark.
|
|
Comments
First, the comparison of a OWC 120GB drive to OCZ's 240GB drives.
In this class 240GB drives are always faster.
Second, by not testing (or mentioning) the OWC extreme6, you completely missed that it now uses a different Sandforce controller! It uses the 2282, and is (as of now) the only drive to do so.
From your SandForce SF-2000 Series SSD Processor Overview:
"High-IO consumer systems will be well suited for the flagship consumer SSD processor: SF-2282. The SandForce SD-2282 is virtually an eight-channel/sixteen lane enterprise drive with MLC NAND, and won't be produced in the same quantities as other controllers."
What a shame to miss such a useful and helpful opportunity.
Had OWC offer other products or capacities, we'd use them. Besides, the difference would be less than 5% max.
As OWC seems to be a very customer friendly small shop, maybe you could just ask your contact?
This is a potential major difference in hardware, as your site had highlighted in your SandForce Processor Overview.
Kudos on even having that bye the way.
Hadn't seen that elsewhere, even the SandForce site.
I'm like many, who need experts to help find the differences.
I refer to the OWC 240GB and 480GB extreme6 drives with a "-T" part number as using the 2282 controller.
The OWC 120GB extreme6 drives with a "T" part number suffix still use the 2281, as you state in the review.
I should also mention that I have both a OCZ 120GB max IOPS, a OWC 120GB extreme6, and a pair of OWC 240 extreme6 drives.
I cloned my old HD (with Intel RST 10.6) onto all four drives and ran AS SSD benches, which I'll post later.
In brief OCZ 120 max IOPS was slowest, OWC 120GB extreme6 was quite a bit faster, and a OWC 240 extreme6 flat blew the others away.
Mind, this was just a quick test of just my drive set-up, but every thing was at least equal.
I just took the SSDs as shipped, cloned a HD and ran a canned test.
My results were:
OCZ 120GB Vertex 3 MI Overall = 356
OWC 120GB Mercury Extreme6 Overall = 373
OWC 240GB Mercury Extreme6 Overall = 489
Is that much of a difference that I might notice in doing video transcoding?
Thanks