Other World Computing Mercury
EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB
ow is it that a company that’s been in
business for nearly two and half decades
and now makes some of the fastest consumer
SSDs manages to fly under the radar of so
many power users? Those of you already fa-
miliar with Other World Computing (aka
OWC) already know the answer.
See, OWC, which is headquartered in
Woodstock (Illinois, that is, not that Wood-
stock) is one of the leading online Mac re-
tailers. In fact, OWC’s URL is www.mac
sales.com. Mac fanatics know that OWC
is a veritable one-stop shop for all things
Mac—software, accessories, component up-
grades, etc. That said, even the PC faithful
owe it to themselves to get acquainted with
OWC; as we mentioned, OWC has an im-
pressive line of solid-state drives. The Mer-
cury EXTREME Pro 6G just happens to be
one of the fastest SSDs we’ve ever tested.
The cheetah’s out of the bag, as it were,
but let’s take a closer look at what makes this
animal so wickedly fast. SandForce’s SF-2200
controller, which needs no introduction at
this point, is the Hemi under the Mercury
EXTREME Pro 6G’s hood. The SF-2200 is
the controller of choice for the vast majority
of today’s cutting-edge enthusiast SSDs, so
we’re not terribly surprised to see it here. The
Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G is also outfitted
with synchronous NAND flash, which gives
it a nice boost when you’re dealing with data
that’s already compressed.
As you can see in the accompanying chart,
the numbers speak for themselves, but a little
additional context is worthwhile in the Mer-
cury EXTREME Pro 6G’s case. OWC adver-
tises 479MBps and 282MBps peak read and
write speeds, respectively, with a workload of
incompressible data. Over the years, we’ve all
been conditioned to take numbers like this
with a grain of salt, because most companies
obtain their numbers in secret underground
labs staffed with Albert Einstein clones. But
H Benchmark Results
look at our CrystalDiskMark and AS-SSD
(which both test with incompressible data)
results. Our sequential writes were between
87% and 95% of OWC’s reported results,
and our sequential reads actually exceeded
OWC’s numbers. In other words, believe
every last word of the hype.
The Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G’s per-
formance alone makes it a legitimate con-
tender, but OWC has a few more tricks up
its sleeve. For starters, OWC lets you take
this SSD for a 30-day spin around your
own personal test track, and if you don’t
like it, OWC will take it back and give you
a full refund. Because we can’t imagine a
sane person actually returning this drive,
what type of warranty are we looking at,
OWC? What’s that you say, five years?
Why, thank you—you really are too kind.
In a ridiculously crowded, unbelievably
competitive SSD market, OWC stands
out as one of the leaders. Keep a close eye
on this company. We’re guessing the best-
kept secret in solid-state storage won’t be a
secret much longer. ¦
BY V INCE
Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB
$459.99 Other World Computing
www.macsales.com C OGLEY
Other World
Computing 240GB
Mercury EXTREME
Pro 6G
CrystalDiskMark 3.01*
Sequential read
513.2 Sequential write
268.2 512KB read
477.1 512KB write
267.9 4K random read QD1
28.9 4K random write QD1
80.3 4K random read QD32
255.4 4K random write QD32
220.4 PCMark 7
Storage 5389
Windows Defender*
5.54 Photo import*
30.29 Video edit*
23.29 Windows Media Center*
8.25 Music add*
1.4 Application loading*
56.38 Gaming*
17.02 AS-SSD*
Sequential read
503.86 Sequential write
246.45 4K read
17.48 4K write
64.5 4K-64Thrd read
248.16 4K-64Thrd write
203.29 *Results in MBps.
Test system specs: Processor:
Intel Core i7-3960X; Motherboard:
GIGABYTE GA-X79-UD3; GPU: NVIDIA
GeForce GTX 580 (2x, SLI); Memory:
8GB Kingston DDR3-2400; Storage:
Kingston 240GB HyperX SSD
Specs: Maximum read/write (compressible data): 559MBps/527MBps; Maximum read/write (incompressible data): 479MBps/282MBps; 4K random read/
write: 37MBps/98MBps; Five-year warranty
26 April 2012 / www.computerpoweruser.com