Stefan Mileschin

The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G previously reviewed at TechREACTION, remains one of the fastest SSDs reviewed here. Well time has passed and 34nm NAND is no longer as readily available so OWC has changed the NAND used to 24nm Synchronous Toggle NAND, why Synchronous NAND? The OFNI 2 specification lists maximum read and writes and only a few MBps difference on the high end. As reviews show though, 8MB cluster sizes are not the end all or be all of SSD performance.

With smaller file sizes especially in the 4K cluster size area, Synchronous NAND can make as much as 50MBps difference or 20-30% better performance in some tests. Others such as incompressible data tests the advantage can jump even higher. Some reports show as much as 100% better performance.

So OWC has moved to 24nm NAND but made sure to use some of the best NAND available to hopefully maintain the performance level of their first generation Mercury Extreme Pro 6G. Previously the Mercury Extreme Pro went toe to toe with the Vertex 3 MAXIOPS, they are the two fastest drives available even still.

The new Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 240 GB Solid State Drive follows suit with everyone else's move to 25nm MLC NAND flash chips. This allows a lower price point per GB and makes an SSD more affordable to the average consumer.

With TechREACTION's new testing platform we will put the Mercury Extreme Pro 6GB through its paces. But wait there's more! OWC was good enough to lend us a total of EIGHT drives to see what it takes to max out the LSI 9265-8i RAID controller with such high performance SSDs we will find the upper limit of the RAID card without a doubt.

If you have not heard of Other World Computing before, it is not surprising. OWC started distributing Mac and Apple accessories in 1988 just outside Chicago, IL. Only in the last couple of years with the rise of the affordable Solid State Drive did OWC become a blip on the PC enthusiast radar. That blip quickly grew though and OWC has received numerous accolades over the last few years.

http://www.techreaction.net/2012/06/...-raid-testing/