OWC Has First Fully Mac & PC Supported Bootable PCIe SSD

By Doug Crowthers
published

Other World Computing has introduced the OWC Mercury Accelsior, the industry’s first both Mac-bootable and PC-bootable, fully supported PCIe SSD card.

The OWC has released its Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD card, which is bootable on both the Mac Pro and PC without the need for drivers. The OWC Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD card is AHCI compliant, so no drivers are required for a truly Plug and Play solution. The Mercury Accelsior utilizes a 2.0 compliant x4 PCIe slot for maximum speed, but can be used in older systems using PCIe 1.0 with a performance penalty.

The Mercury Accelsior uses dual LSI SandForce SF-2281 series processors with 7 percent over provisioning, along with 24 nm Multi-Level Cell (MLC) Toggle-Synchronous NAND Flash memory. The custom SandForce Driven Accelsior SSD blades are available in capacities of 64 GB up to 512 GB via a special mini PCIe-style slots on the SSD card. This design will allow users to upgrade to larger Mercury Accelsior SSD blades in the future. OWC lists the sequential performance of the Mercury Accelsior to be up to 780 MB/s read and 648 MB/s write. The card offers random 4K performance of up to 100,000 IOPS for both read and writes.

The Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD card is available for immediate ordering in the following SSD capacities:

  • 120 GB (2 x 64 GB for 128 GB total flash) @ $399.99
  • 240 GB (2 x 128 GB for 256 GB total flash) @ $549.99 (available in early May)
  • 480 GB (2 x 256 GB for 512 GB total flash) @ $979.99
  • 960 GB (2 x 500 GB for 1.0 TB total flash) @ $2,179.99
Doug Crowthers
13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • dgingeri
    It'd be cheaper to get an enterprise level raid controller with 512MB of cache and a couple regular SSDs, and get more available ports, and probably better performance.
    Reply
  • drwho1
    saw this on another site, looks promising, but this technology is still in its infancy.
    still I like to watch this technology mature.
    Reply
  • drwho1
    here is the review: http://thessdreview.com/latest-buzz/owc-releases-first-fully-bootable-pcie-ssd-for-mac-and-pc/
    Reply
  • halcyon
    Nice. One of these may find a way into my 2010 Mac Pro and replace the 2 x 120GB Vertex2's in software RAID 0. Needed? No, I'll check, but pretty sure...no...not needed. ...but it my get me slightly closer to getting things done yesterday.
    Reply
  • kaisellgren
    Nice to see bootable PCI-E SSDs. We are pretty much limited by SATA 3 at this point, so with PCI-E we can pass that limit... at least to some extent. :)
    Reply
  • halcyon
    The idea that this is simply usable in both Macs and PCs almost makes me HAVE to have it. ...at least that's what I'll be telling myself.
    Reply
  • hannibal
    This is actually guite cheap for PCI-E ssd... Maybe we will see some competition allso in this segment soon?
    Reply
  • thebigt42
    amdfreakWould be great if OWC would be the first to introduce the hardware support for RAID over PCI-E SSDsStill waiting on Super Talent's Raid 0 with 4 drive card
    http://www.tomshardware.com/news/RAIDDrive-upStream-PCIe-SSD-SSD-SandForce,14974.html
    Reply
  • __-_-_-__
    actually this is very reasonable priced (concerning pci-e ssd's ofc...)
    Reply
  • halcyon
    This looks like it performs very similarly to a RevoDrive 3
    Reply