Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD — Benefits and Applications

2012-04-16 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: hard drive, Other World Computing, PCIe SSD, SSD, storage

OWC Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD card

The OWC Mercury Accelsior opens up robust and capacious configuration options, and it can be configured into the ultimate Mac Pro for photographers, the MPG Pro Workstation.

Benefits and applications:

• Bootable, no driver needed! Mac OS X can boot from the Accelsior.
• The Accelsior E2 variant also offers dual eSATA ports.
• Optimize daily workflow — makes a superb drive for an Adobe Lightroom catalog, large Photoshop files, scratch disk, etc.
• By utilizing the Accelsior to optimize daily workflow, all 4 of the Mac Pro drive bays remain available for high capacity hard drives (e.g., the 4TB Hitachi Deskstar) for up to 16TB of internal storage for images, video, etc.
• System can have ample storage with no hard drives at all! Many users might find a single 960GB Accelsior enough storage for a long time.
• Watch disk I/O speed issue all but disappear with everything you do; the computer can ran at full speed, all the time, because it doesn’t have to wait for a slow hard drive.
• Install up to three Accelsior SSDS with up to 960GB each (~ 3TB of SSD!)
• Accelsior cards can be striped for performance in excess of what any program can use.
• Accelsior cards be be mirrored for fault tolerance.

My own system

I find the advantages so compelling for my own photography work that I am in the process of migrating my own MPG Pro Workstation system to a new configuration using the OWC Mercury Accelsior, plunking down my own cash to do so.

My targeted config is one 960GB card for my Master working volume, and one 480GB card for my Scratch working space (huge PSD/PSB/TIF files for my photography).