Tom's Hardware's Summer Guide: 17 SSDs Rounded Up

OWC Mercury Extreme SSD (100 GB)

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.

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