We are so excited about the new OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD that we did a pre-shipping test to four highly-respected independent review labs—BareFeats, Mac Performance Guide, The SSD Review, and TweakTown—so they could put our new SSD to the test and see how it stacked up. Our hopes were high, especially after all the accolades the 6G’s older brother, the original OWC Mercury Extreme Pro, managed to accrue over the last two years.
We weren’t disappointed. All four reviewers have reported back and it looks like we’ve got another hit on our hands.
In his review of the 6G, Rob-ART of BareFeats said the “OWC 6G SSD is the fastest SSD we have tested to date.” In the SpeedTools Test Suite he used to compare the 6G to the competition, the OWC offering soundly defeated the competition, and in something just as interesting, the Mercury Extreme Pro, a 3Gb/s drive, actually kept pace with (and in one test, beat) a competing 6Gb/s drive! With a showing like that, you can be sure our Mercury Pro 6G SSD is going to be the drive to beat.
Lloyd Chambers of Mac Performance Guide has a tendency to beat the stuffing out of a drive. He subjects these drives to levels of abuse that would take “real world” users years to dish out. You can pretty much see that it takes quite a bit to impress him, so when he declared the performance he got out of his OWC 120GB Mercury Extreme Pro 6G as “never-before-seen single-drive speeds— awesome!” we took that with a great deal of pride, especially when he claimed that “Just yesterday, to get these speeds, I’d have to install two SSDs and use them as a RAID-0 stripe.”
The first two reviews we heard from were Mac-centric sources; that makes sense, as we’re kinda Mac oriented. However, like the Mercury Extreme Pros before them, the new Pro 6G SSDs are very much at home in the PC world. We wanted to make sure that both sides of the fence are represented, so we sent a drive to Les Tokar of The SSD Review to see what he had to say about it. After four pages’ worth of test results, the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD walked away with an “Editors Choice without a second thought!”
Last, but not least, though, we heard from Chris Ramseyer from TweakTown, who, after calling the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G “the fastest single SSD we’ve tested”, proceeded to describe how much faster his computer felt compared to a previous-generation SSD from another vendor. When all was said and done, the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G walked off with another “Editor’s Choice” award, with their “Bottom Line” stating that “Words like instant, fast and even phrases like OMG are brought to new levels of comprehension.”
Look for our formal announcement early next week, but if you want to get your Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD right now, the 120GB models are already available.
Need to say when i see such hardware i always cry that i didnt born in US and i dont live there. EU u suck :(
A quick browse through 6G PCIe cards available there at OWC I see top out at only 500MB/s transfer rates rather than the expected 600MB/s. For the latest Mac Pro, what 6G PCIe card do you recommend to be paired with this SSD to get the performance being advertised?
Hi Matt….we’re currently evaluating SATA 3.0 PCI cards. Currently nothing we have allows you to cleanly install the cabling required to connnect and power drives in a Mac Pro.
These look great. Is Anand going to be reviewing these?
He’s been offered such…esp since our 120GB uses the FULL 16 channel die implementation and the OCZ 120GB…as we understand it and as Anand stated on techzilla only uses 8 channels…maybe you can convince him to hand us the title like others have Jon ;-)
So I would guess the Thunderbolt Raid case is Next?
One can only dream…’course that’s what TweakTown said about our new SSDs…speed you could only dream of in past ;-)
Very excited about the drives being released but I have to ask: were these models tested for the hibernation (and to a lesser extent sleep) issues that the Mercury Pros exhibited in some MBPs? I know the problem, which was only experienced by a small number of purchasers, was attributed to firmware which was recently updated, but I am just wondering is these drives have been tested for similar issues? Thanks.
hey…thanks for stopping by!
Different machines and different drives so not truly comparable….but that said, we haven’t observed any power issues. We have however heard reports for over a month about a factory hardware issue that affects all 6G drives…and we’ve found a fix for that in just a few days of investigation. Look for a separate post on that!