You can’t go wrong with a Power Mac–like design.

When we reviewed Other World Computing’s Mercury Elite Pro FW800 (Mar/05, p46), we criticized its case design. So it’s only fair to say right off the bat that the Mercury Elite-AL Pro’s case is a vast improvement; it’s a solid, sturdy aluminum job that has a grill like a Power Mac G5. And there’s more to like about the Mercury Elite-AL Pro than just its case design: The drive comes with FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2.0 connectors—and kudos to OWC for including cables for each connector. At the heart of the drive we tested—the 400GB model—is a 7,200-rpm 400GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K400 with an 8MB cache.

Speed. We took a look at the drive’s speed using all three connectors on our dual 2.7GHz Power Mac G5. Over FireWire 800, the Mercury Elite showed sequential 256KB uncached data-transfer speeds of around 52 MBps and 58 MBps when writing and reading, respectively, according to Xbench (free, www.xbench.com), a popular benchmarking utility. Those numbers compare quite favorably with the 55-MBps read and write speeds of the Power Mac’s internal 250GB Maxtor Serial ATA drive. The Mercury Elite did even better in random reads and writes, showing speeds of 26 MBps and 30 MBps; the Mac’s internal drive reads at 21 MBps and writes at 28 MBps. When we duplicated a 2GB file in the Finder, the internal drive was just 2 seconds faster than the Mercury Elite.

The bottom line.
There’s a lot to like about the Mercury Elite—great speed, a nice case, and a plethora of connectivity options.

—Roman Loyola

Good News
Excellent case design. Three connection options. Bundled cables.

Bad News
Nothing we can think of—honestly.

Company: Other World Computing
Contact: 800-275-4576 http://eshop.macsales.com
Price: $159.99 (80GB) to $499.99 (500GB); 400GB tested
Requirements: FireWire 800–, FireWire 400–, or USB-equipped Mac; Mac OS 8.6 to 9.x or 10.1.x or later