“We received a sample late today of the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD. We used QuickBench from the Speed Tools Test Suite to sample the small random reads/writes (average of 4K to 1024K blocks – 5 cycles each) and large sequential read/writes (20M to 100M blocks – 5 cycles each),” Bare Feats reports. “We compared it to four other solid state drives (SSDs) along with one of the fastest hard disk drives (HDDs).”
“The OWC 6G SSD is the fastest SSD we have tested to date),” Bare Feats reports. “Based on the SandForce SF-2200 chipset with built-in wear leveling and error correction code along with over-provisioning, it’s an excellent performance upgrade to any of the 2011 MacBook Pros (all of which have the 6Gb/s interface.) Also if you have a Mac Pro with a four lane or faster 6Gb/s host adapter, you should get similar results. (We will test that scenario soon.)”
Full article with the benchmark results here.
Tried one of these as the boot drive on my Mac Pro a couple of months ago and it is incredibly fast, but would sometimes act strange on a boot or waking from sleep.
I use a UPEK finger scanner for login at the password prompt and sometimes the Mac would boot right through to the login without any PW window or take the fingerprint. Only cure was a forced (button) reboot. Booting from a mirrored HD backup file never did this.
I never could get a straight answer from Apple, UPEK or OWC as to the source of the issue.
Took it out and installed it in my Unibody 13 Al MacBook (without Fingerprint Scanner) and it works just fine. Sold the MacBook on eBay and the new owner loves it.
Would love to put one back on the MacPro, but not with the flaky wake from sleep/boot issues.
@RDF
What you tried a couple of months ago was not this product but an earlier model.
Hard drives having a shoot-out?
I’m not gonna touch that one…..
This is a 120gb SSD that does not drop performance from the larger 240 models..
That’s truly amazing news since the 120gb vertex 3 performs no where near as good as it’s larger 240gb brother making the OWC the perfect affordable boot drive..
So glad i waited.. these results are phenomenal at the 120gb SSD level.. Nothing comes close to it..
Surprising. I thought Apple-friendly vendor OWC mostly contracted manufacturing of existing designs and products, and put their OWC “sticker” (or their in-house “NewerTech” label) on it. But this product, with measurably better results from other similar products, shows they are creating NEW designs that do not exist elsewhere.
In any case, they remain my favorite place to shop for Apple-related tech gear. I will buy one of these SSD’s, eventually.