Holy cow! If prices keep falling around here, I’m going to need to buy a helmet! Following those price drops on the miniStack v3, OWC’s slashing the prices on the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID. I had the pleasure of playing with one of these a while back, and I really liked it. It was easy to connect and it was easily fast enough for the data I was throwing at it. If I had justification for high-speed or high-capacity storage, it would certainly be on the top of my list.
Of course, what it really comes down to is the features, and that’s where this already-great storage solution really shines. Here’s the highlights:
- Triple-Interface – The Mercury Elite-AL Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID can connect up via FireWire 800, FireWire 400, or USB 2.0. All you need to do is plug it in and go, so its great for projects that need to bounce between computers.
- Fully Bootable – If you’re taking advantage of the drive’s speed by cloning your system to it, you can rest assured that if your main drive goes down, you can boot right to the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID and continue working. Speed enthusiasts may also want to try using it as their main boot drive, taking advantage of the speed this solution can offer.
- Custom Oxford-based bridge – This A/V Certified bridge chipset ensures fast and reliable data transfer between the drives and your computer.
- Fast, Fast, Fast – There are two 7200 RPM drives, configured in a RAID 0 (striped) in this solution. This provides phenomenal read/write speeds, making disk-intensive tasks, such as video capture and editing, much faster.
- Large Capacity – The Mercury Elite-AL Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID is available in capacities up to 4.0TB. That’s enough room to store all your music, Photos, capture video, or even make backups.
- No searching for cables – Like all OWC products, the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID comes with all the cables you need. Whether you need FireWire 800, FireWire 400 or USB 2.0, the cable is in the box so you can use your drive right away.
- Backup software included – For making your backups easy, we include the full retail version of Prosoft DataBackup III ($59 retail value) for OS X and NovaStor NovaBackup ($49 retail value) for Windows. Also included is the Intech HD Speedtools performance suite and Carbon Copy Cloner. None of these applications are required to use the Elite, but they are excellent applications to have in your utilities library.
- 3-Year Warranty – The Mercury Elite-AL Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID is backed by an industry leading 3 Year Full Solution Warranty, underscoring OWC’s commitment to quality, performance and reliability.
- The Mercury Elite-AL Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID also qualifies for our exclusive Prosoft Drive Genius offer! Buy Drive Genius now for as low as $25 with purchase of a qualifying storage product – That’s up to 74% off retail price, up to 37% off OWC’s lowest normal selling price!
So now we know that the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID is packed with features. That means that it’s going to be extremely expensive, right? Of course it isn’t! That was the whole point of this post in the first place! Check it out the offerings:
- 640GB 7200RPM with 32MB Data Buffer – $184.99
- 1.0TB 7200RPM with 32MB Data Buffer – $199.99
- 1.5TB 7200RPM with 64MB Data Buffer – $257.99
- 2.0TB 7200RPM with 32MB Data Buffer – $259.99
- 2.0TB 7200RPM with 64MB Data Buffer – was $329.99, NOW $294.99 (a $35 price drop!)
- 2.0TB “Enterprise Class” 7200RPM w/64MB Buffer – NOW $364.99
- 3.0TB 7200RPM with 64MB of Data Buffer – $379.99
- 4.0TB GreenPower w/64MB of Data Buffer – was $749.99, now $679.99 (a $70 price drop)
- OWC Elite-AL Pro RAID SATA HD x 2 enclosure kits are also available without drives as ‘Add Your Own Hard Drives Kit’ starting from $104.99, and have user configurable options for different RAID and non-RAID modes.
For fast storage that’s easy use, you can’t go wrong with the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Performance 7200RPM RAID. For best value, you can’t go wrong with OWC.
