Two unique features that stand out with the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD release are that performance will not be lost as the SSD fills and that it will remain intact over the life of the drive due to its 28% over provisioning. This certainly goes against the grain of what we have seen with SSDs historically and it has become common place to provide advise that degradation may start once filled passed the 60% mark. There have also been some observation that some SSDs would maintain peak performance only until all the NAND flash have been filled to capacity for the first time.
For those new to solid state drives, firmware of the drive includes wear leveling technology which allows the SSD to store information equally amongst NAND cells to allow maximum life of the NAND flash memory. When one describes a SSD as having being filled, it may simply mean that all the cells of the available RAM have been utilized at some point in time and not that the SSD is full.
The SSD Review testing was simple. The OWC SSD had been completely written to or "filled" five times. The drive was then subject to further data storage starting at 50% and every 10% thereafter until full, to which Crystal Disk Mark and ATTO Benchmark performance testing was conducted at every level. An amusing observation was that when the OWC SSD was filled completely, the benchmark software would not function as there was no free space on the drive to write to. This answered the question as to whether any of the 28Gb of drive dedicated memory would be made available to the user as the SSD filled which was considered a possibility as performance is guaranteed regardless of how close to capacity it is.
The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD has not diminished in performance under any testing condition since it was first benchmarked on arrival at The SSD Review. This is not a characteristic of any previous SSD release that we are aware of but, quite possibly, we may start to see it should another drive be released with matching controller and over provisioning. A similar Crystal Disk Score with the drive filled to capacity could not be found anywhere on the web.
For those new to solid state drives, firmware of the drive includes wear leveling technology which allows the SSD to store information equally amongst NAND cells to allow maximum life of the NAND flash memory. When one describes a SSD as having being filled, it may simply mean that all the cells of the available RAM have been utilized at some point in time and not that the SSD is full.
The SSD Review testing was simple. The OWC SSD had been completely written to or "filled" five times. The drive was then subject to further data storage starting at 50% and every 10% thereafter until full, to which Crystal Disk Mark and ATTO Benchmark performance testing was conducted at every level. An amusing observation was that when the OWC SSD was filled completely, the benchmark software would not function as there was no free space on the drive to write to. This answered the question as to whether any of the 28Gb of drive dedicated memory would be made available to the user as the SSD filled which was considered a possibility as performance is guaranteed regardless of how close to capacity it is.
The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD has not diminished in performance under any testing condition since it was first benchmarked on arrival at The SSD Review. This is not a characteristic of any previous SSD release that we are aware of but, quite possibly, we may start to see it should another drive be released with matching controller and over provisioning. A similar Crystal Disk Score with the drive filled to capacity could not be found anywhere on the web.
Below are the original results of the OWC SSD on first installation (left) and then at the end of the evaluation when filled to capacity, the latter of which looks to actually be performing better.
CONCLUSION
We have to give two thumbs up to the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD as it is the highest performing drive examined amongst many in the past few years. It is one of the best releases available today and if you are a Mac owner, this is definitely the SSD for you. OWC has done well in providing such a premium product and ensuring that PC users will pay attention as it is capable of running TRIM flawlessly.
The OWC SSD also gains a great deal of respect having survived the constant filling and formatting that we put it through without missing a step and then picking up the pace by displaying better benchmark scores when filled to capacity than on its first install scoring. Quite frankly, this is still somewhat unbelievable and the Crystal Disk Mark results verifying what we have seen first hand are unquestionable proof of the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSDs quality.
DISCUSS THE REVIEW HERE!
DISCUSS THE REVIEW HERE!
1 comments:
very nice and simple review man,
the SF controller is about the thing to say when fronting any SF based drive.
not to forget, Intel's X25-M's are pretty old drives when every year or so a new generation of technological equipment is being thrown into the market, yet still, the intel is preforming better,
not through speed, yet by random performance which can be seen at the HDTune benches.
it is hard comparing a new drive or controller to a 2 years old one,
Intel with it's older performance is to bring a super drive to the market with the emerge of the G3,
it is a company with a lot of capabilities.
as for now, what we have, is the SF and Marvel based drives which are in general, good drive,
at least the SF are,
OWC benefit is 5 years of warranty which enables the user to do about everything to the drive.
that, with a very good controller is well enough in the meantime until intel would drop it's 2 bit MLC's and SLC's 25nm to the market with an even greater capacity the the current drives, SATA3 and maybe even with a better price.
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