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OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini USB-C SSD
Related: 2018 Mac mini, backup, diglloydTools, DiskTester, hard drive, Mac mini, Other World Computing, OWC Mercury Elite Pro, OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini, Samsung, SSD, storage, USB, USB-C
MPG tested the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini USB-C 1TB SSD.
The OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini USB-C is the latest revision of a sturdy performer which has proven itself over years of use.
Supporting 2.5-inch hard drives or SSDs, it’s a great way to add near-silent bus-powered storage to any Mac of just about any generation, because it ships with cables for USB-A or USB-C or eSATA connectivity.
- Compatible with Thunderbolt 3 ports via the supplied USB-C cable.
- USB 3.1 Gen2
- Bus powered (no power adapter needed).
- Compatible with macOS 10.6 through 10.14 and Windows 7 through Windows 10
- Available with hard drives from 500GB to 4TB, SSDs from 500GB to 2TB, or enclosure only.
Flexible connections. Quiet operation.
Perfect for a day in the studio, on-set and everywhere in between, the OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini with USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 compatibility is a powerhouse for data transfer and storage. The Mercury Elite Pro mini with USB-C fits 2.5" Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive or Solid State Drives (SSD). The Mercury Elite Pro mini features a heat-dissipating, fanless design for cool, super-quiet operation.
Rocket power. Pocket size.
Made for fast-transfer and secure storage, it”s ideal for photo and video shoots, editing, motion graphics, audio, Time Machine backups, and all your other data needs. And in a lightweight, impact-resistant brushed aluminum enclosure, it easily goes where you go.
Various uses
There are many uses for an overflow drive this fast (more on that below):
- A clone backup or a Time Machine backup volume.
- Up to 2TB of fast external “overflow” storage.
- An alternate boot drive (for another Mac OS and/or a Windows boot).
- Fast file transfer or sharing between more than one computer.
Continues below.
Performance as tested: sustained transfer speed across capacity
DiskTester is part of diglloydTools. The DiskTester fill-volume test writes 1000 equal-size files to the drive, then read/verifies the data.
Read performance is outstanding, about as fast as can be had from a 2.5-inch SATA drive. Write performance is not quite as high, but still very fast, delivering an outstandingly consistent and very fast 450 MB/sec.
For perspective, a striped RAID-0 of the fastest hard drives available would scarcely manage the write speeds seen here. Similarly, the the Samsung T5 does not reach these read speeds and its write speeds are less consistent.
Write: 520 MB/sec
Read: 560 MB/sec
Speed in MB/sec is real-world, including operating system file system overhead (not unrealistic driver-level calls).
Write speed with the 1TB SSD is a bit slower on the 2018 Mac mini.
Performance as tested: speed vs transfer size
Tested with the run-sequential-suite command of diglloydTools DiskTester.
Transfer speeds rise rapidly with the size of the transfer. Read speeds are outstanding, about as high as possible for a SATA SSD for reads once the transfer size rises.
Compared to the Samsung T5, read speeds are slightly higher, and write speeds are about 13% slower. This is very high performance for a SATA-based bus-powered SDD.
Conclusions
The OWC Mercury Elite Pro Mini 1TB SSD delivers outstanding performance for this class of SSD.
