OWC Mercury Electra 3G MAX 960GB Review: 1TB of NAND in 2.5" Form Factor
by Kristian Vättö on October 18, 2012 1:00 AM ESTPerformance Over Time & TRIM
To see how the Mercury Electra behaves when pushed into a corner, I filled the drive with incompressible data and then tortured it with incompressible 4KB random writes (100% LBA space, QD=32) for 60 minutes:
| OWC Mercury Electra 3G MAX 960GB - Resiliency - AS SSD Sequential Write Speed - 6Gbps | |||
| Clean | After Torture | After TRIM | |
| OWC Mercury Electra 3G MAX | 187.5MB/s | 185.0MB/s | 206.7MB/s |
The results I got are rather unusual, although logical; performance does not degrade noticeably when the drive is tortured. The reason for this is the massive capacity and slow random write speed. It takes two hours to just fill the drive with sequential data, so 60 minutes of torturing doesn't even do one full drive write. IOmeter showed the random write speed to be around 20MB/s, which equals 72GB of host writes in 60 minutes. For comparison, most SandForce drives are writing at over 100MB/s at the end of the torture, so that works out to be ~360GB in one hour.
It seems that TRIM actually improved performance, but I don't believe that's true. The problem with the 960GB Mercury Electra is that it cannot be secure erased due to the internal RAID controller. Hence we had to do sequential write passes to restore performance after every test, which unfortunately doesn't lead to as ideal a scenario as secure erase. Moreover, I saw huge performance variation when running AS-SSD multiple times. I reran AS-SSD straight after the post-TRIM run and write speed was only 132.7MB/s. A third run was ~190MB/s again so it's hard to draw any clear conclusions.
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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.