OWC Mercury Electra 3G MAX 960GB Review: 1TB of NAND in 2.5" Form Factor

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• dishayu - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link

  I see 2x Crucial m4 in the charts? Is it the same drive running sata 2 and sata 6gbps?

• JarredWalton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link

  Correct. The one line says "Crucial m4 256GB (6Gbps)" and the other is "Crucial m4 256GB"; there are a couple other drives tested on both 6Gbps and 3Gbps (Vertex 3 and Agility 3).

• jigglywiggly - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link

  yeah this is junk.
  just get a 500gb vertex 4

• Argyris - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link

  I think there's one consideration that wasn't mentioned, and that's durability. I can't of course speak for this specific model (maybe the more complex internals could impact long-term durability, but most likely not), but for SSDs in general this is a major plus. I've been rather unlucky with HDDs and have lost two of them to physical impact damage. One of the main reasons I bought a SSD for my main laptop was so I don't have to worry about this happening again.
  
  If you're dependent on your laptop for your work and you need a lot of storage space (more than 512GB), the peace of mind of knowing that your whole livelihood's worth of data is safer than if it were on a spinning disc has got to be worth a few bucks.
  
  Still, though, you have to wonder how many of these people couldn't get by for the time being with a 512GB drive (or the 768GB one offered by Apple).

• Denithor - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link

  Well, first, if your data is so critical it should be backed up routinely on a very regular schedule. Offsite. Like every night, uploaded to a cloud drive somewhere.
  
  Which would effectively address the need for more than 512GB/768GB of "hands-on" high-speed storage - as everything not needed routinely could be kept on external drive and/or cloud storage.

• Wolfpup - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link

  I'd generally trust a mechanical hard drive more than an SSD for reliability. The ONLY brands I'd trust for SSDs are Micron/Crucial and Intel...no way in heck I'd get a sandforce drive from someone else, and even then they haven't been 100% perfect.

• ArKritz - Saturday, October 20, 2012 - link

  Great, more Samsung for the rest of us...

• yankeeDDL - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link

  I love the novelty: I think raid0 is a great solution to keep costs low, use the current hardware/NANDs.
  I also don't mind the performance. But the price?
  There are already SSDs with costs below $1/GB. For 1TB, the cost of enclosure, assembly, boards ... should be proportionally lower. I think it would be fair in today's market to pay $750~$800 for this SSD, but no more.
  I am still an SSD-skeptic at these costs: sorry but for me until I can get 1TB for less than $300, this is a no-no. Yes, I can install a mechanical HD for storing large files, but I dual-boot and ~100GB are always gone between Windows and Linux, so 256GB feel too tight and anything larger is still way too expensive.

• JarredWalton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link

  Note: editing to remove some referrals. Sorry, but if we leave those in we just encourage spammers and run the risk of more people doing this.
  
  RE: Love the novelty, not the price by amdwilliam1985 on Thursday, October 18, 2012
  Check out Samsung 830 from amazon, I got the email this morning, man these are lovely prices. I got my Samsung 128GB for more than $150 a while ago.
  
  samsung 830 128gb = $69.99
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0077CR60Q/
  
  samsung 830 256gb = $154.99
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0077CR66A/
  
  Not sure how long these prices will last.
  If I don't already own an SSD in my windows 7 laptop, I'll be grabbing the 256gb for sure. Samsung and Intel has the best quality as far as I know in SSD.

• DanNeely - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link

  Samsung is launching the 840 series drives; the 830 sales will probably end when inventory is depleted.