OWC’s Mercury Extreme is another drive built with the SandForce SF-1200 controller. Clearly, SandForce's cache-less architecture delivers some hot performance benefits, and the Mercury Extreme follows suit. As explained before, SandForce controllers over-provision storage capacity to ensure sufficient room for managing data intelligently in order to avoid write amplification performance degradation.
Performance mirrors the OCZ Vertex 2 100 GB and G.Skill Phoenix 100 GB. However, the OWC drive is more expensive than its competitors, spoiling its ranking in our cost per gigabyte and price/performance charts. However, the price at the time we performed the tests was corrected from $399 to $314.99, which you should keep in mind when comparing SSDs.
Since the drive, or at least our sample, wasn’t optimized to tackle 4K random writes efficiently, you’d be getting a potentially slower product at a higher price. Power consumption is also a bit higher than on the other SandForce drives. Clearly, there's potential here, but a price correction seems necessary.
- Tom’s Hardware Mainstream SSD Shootout
- The SSD Landscape
- Asax Leopard Hunt II (TS25M64, 128 GB)
- Asax Server One 120 (200 GB)
- Crucial RealSSD C300 (64 GB)
- G.Skill Phoenix FM25S2S (100 GB)
- G.Skill Phoenix Pro (120 GB)
- Intel X25-V (40 GB)
- OCZ Vertex 2 (VTX100G, 100 GB)
- OCZ Vertex 2 (E series, VTX2E120G, 120 GB)
- OWC Mercury Extreme SSD (100 GB)
- RunCore Kylin II SSD (100 GB)
- Test Setup
- Benchmark Results: Access Time
- Benchmark Results: I/O Performance
- Benchmark Results: Read/Write Throughput
- Benchmark Results: 4K Random Reads/Writes And Interface Bandwidth
- Benchmark Results: PCMark Vantage
- Benchmark Results: Power Consumption
- Benchmark Results: Power Efficiency
- Performance Indexes
- Conclusion
- Comparison Table


