All Posts by Date or last 15, 30, 90 or 180 days.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases @AMAZON

Designed for the most demanding needs of photographers and videographers.
The fastest, toughest, and most compatible portable SSD ever with speeds up to 2800MB/s.

OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD Tested In 2010 Mac Pro Internal 3 Gb SATA II Port

See yesterday’s test on the 2011 MacBook Pro, which uses a 6 Gb SATA III port.

Do not directly compare results here on this site with results using other test protocols, other test software, results from Windows PCs, etc. Some users seem to think that comparing these results to a Windows PC with different hardware and different test protocols is somehow reasonable. It’s not. Nor is comparing to something like QuickBench appropriate; these tests are more comprehensive, not a few seconds or minutes like many tests.

The 2011 Mac Pro 3.33 GHz 6-core has 3 Gb SATA II ports— half the speed. So we can expect the drive to max-out at about 270MB/sec. But that’s not all— a 6G drive run on a 3G port could in fact run more slowly than a 3G drive.

SATA III is still a bleeding edge technology, and it wouldn’t be surprising that the 6G port pushes the limits of the motherboard in the 2011 MacBook Pro. The fact that the Intel 510 would not even format makes me suspicious of my 2011 Macbook Pro.

I ran a fill-volume test using DiskTester, to gauge the speed across the drive capacity for writes and reads.

Mac Pro on SATA II 3 Gbps port

We can see that the read-speed dips are completely gone on the 3G port on the Mac Pro. Therefore, it’s plausible that the MacBook Pro SATA III port might be degrading the performance of the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G.

I’m hearing and reading plausible feedback that leads me to believe that the 2011 MacBook Pro results are quite possibly due to a poor quality internal SATA cable as supplied by Apple.

The average speeds are slightly slower than the OWC 3G SSD, but not by much. All the drives do show a drop in the last few percent of capacity; this could have something to do with the Mac OS X file system, and I’d suggest ignoring it.

Average write MB/sec: 249.3
Average read MB/sec: 263.6

On both machines, filling the drive beyond 98% of capacity does incur some write speed slowdown.

Write and read speeds across entire capacity of OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD
(Disktester fill-volume test on Apple Mac Pro 3.33 GHz 6-core)

Compared to 2011 MacBook Pro

Compare to the behavior on the 2011 MacBook Pro with its 6 Gbps SATA III port:

Write and read speeds across entire capacity of OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD
(Disktester fill-volume test on Apple Mac Pro 3.33 GHz 6-core)
View all handpicked deals...

Voigtlander MACRO APO-LANTHAR 65mm f/2 Aspherical Lens for Sony E
$999 $849
SAVE $150

diglloyd.com | Terms of Use | PRIVACY POLICY
Contact | About Lloyd Chambers | Consulting | Photo Tours
Mailing Lists | RSS Feeds | X.com/diglloyd
Copyright © 2020 diglloyd Inc, all rights reserved.
Display info: __RETINA_INFO_STATUS__