Shopping Quick Links Articles & Reviews Latest News

MPG Table of Contents   Page 1: Real-World SSD Performance Considerations (Introduction) Page 2: Seasoning SSDs for Testing Page 3: New vs Seasoned OWC Mercury Pro RE 200GB Page 4: New vs Seasoned OWC Mercury Pro 240GB Page 5: New vs Seasoned Crucial RealSSD 256GB Page 6: New vs Seasoned Crucial M225 256GB Page 7: New vs Seasoned Intel 160GB G2 Page 8: Comparing SSD Performance Results Page 9: Comparing SSD Performance: Fill-volume 1000-file Test Results Page 10: Severe Duty: OWC Extreme Pro RE vs Crucial RealSSD Page 11: Severe Duty: OWC Extreme Pro vs Intel 160GB G2 Page 12: Severe Duty: OWC Extreme Pro vs Apple 512GB SSD Page 13: Real World SSD Performance Conclusions

New vs Seasoned OWC Mercury Pro 240GB

The OWC Mercury Pro has 7% over-provisioning, which means that 7% of its flash memory is set aside for error correction, bad blocks, and performance enhancements.

Its RAID-0-ready sibling, the Mercury Pro RE has 28% over-provisioning (200GB capacity). Both variants are outstanding choices. Choose the 240GB Pro model for single-drive use, or the 200GB model for ultra-high performance RAID-0 use.

The OWC Mercury Extreme consumes only 0.55 watt in use, and 0.05 watt at idle. In other words, up to 8X less power use than the Crucial RealSSD on writes, and 4X less on reads.

As of April 2010, the OWC Mercury Extreme (either model) are the only SSDs that I feel confident recommending. Either the Pro or the Pro RE models are great choice for the MPG Pro Workstation or MPG Pro Laptop, depending on workload and/or whether RAID-0 striping is used.

Performance brand-new and after seasoning

The OWC Mercury Extreme graph below looks like only one write/read test was done because the results are all but identical when new and when seasoned.

In the graph below, reads are green and writes are red. This is a flawless performance! Click for a larger graph.