New vs Seasoned OWC Mercury Pro RE 200GB

See review and specifications.

The OWC Mercury Pro RE has 28% over-provisioning, which means that 28% of its memory is set aside for error correction, bad blocks, and performance enhancements. It is an enterprise-grade unit with a rated MTBF of 10 million hours, about 8 times longer than the best hard drives! Unlike some SSDs, it has no memory buffer, which is a very good thing should the power fail: no data loss.

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 is the only SSD that I now feel confident recommending.

Performance brand-new and after seasoning

The OWC Mercury Pro RE 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.

Average speed across the volume