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
