Tom's Hardware's Summer Guide: 17 SSDs Rounded Up
Which SSD should you buy today? Seventeen flash-based drives battle across a benchmark suite that include throughput, I/O performance, consistency, power consumption, efficiency, and the best overall bang for the buck. The time is right to upgrade.
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.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Current page: OWC Mercury Extreme SSD (100 GB)
Prev Page OCZ Vertex 2 (E series, VTX2E120G, 120 GB) Next Page RunCore Kylin II SSD (100 GB)