OWC Premium SandForce-Based Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 240GB SSD is Blazing Fast!

Unboxing

Here is the retail package that you would buy from OWC. As you can see the contents are well-packed for transport safely to your door as inside the clamshell, the precious contents are well-protected by the soft packing material with anti-static properties. SSDs are by their nature, rather tough anyway.

We note the promised tech service and the 5-year warranty are printed right on the box as well as that it is proudly deigned and built in America.

Here is the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD out of the packing.

Here is the SSD’s other side and we see the standard connections.

The physical look and dimensions of all SSDs are the same except for their thickness (7mm for notebook – not shown – and 9mm for desktop). All SSDs all have the standard SATA power and data connectors.

Testing the SSDs versus the HDD

Below is Thermaltake’s BlackXduet 2.0 USB and eSATA hard drive dock which proved very useful in reading data from internal drives that are now accessed as external drives. Check out the review published by Leon Hyman. We also use find the built-in USB 3.0 docks on the top of our Thermaltake Chaser MK-I and Overseer RX-I are also extremely useful for transferring data quickly and for cloning drives.  We also received a very useful external USB 3.0 SSD/USB Dock from Newer Technology which we shall be evaluating for ABT readers next week. We set up Windows 7 64-bit on one of our Seagate 500GB 7200.12 Barracuda hard drives along with two or three games, favorite applications and benching tools. We put about 100GB or so of data on our HDD so that we would not have any issues cloning the HDD to our 4 SSDs, the one with the smallest capacity being 120GB.

There is no software nor any hardware supplied with the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD.  We used Acronis cloning software to make a exact copy of our HDD to all five SSDs (individually, each in under 15 minutes), and we were able to then boot from any of the now identically cloned drives. However, before we get to the benching, let’s recap the SSD and what makes it unique from mechanical drives.

SSD Recap

One mistake many enthusiasts make is to think of a SSD like a mechanical HDD. Instead, think of it as a giant flash drive with the strengths and weaknesses inherent to that kind of storage. MrK’s article on the previous series of Kingston SSDNow is extraordinarily well-written and detailed, and it would be good to review it if you are not familar with Solid-State storage. Also, here is his article on the faster but much more expensive Patriot TorqX 256 GB SSD which goes into even more detail. MrK explains the strengths and weaknesses of the SSD. Instead of repeating his information, this section will be the briefiest of recaps and we will focus instead on secure erase and performance degradation.

Because of the way data is written to and erased from a SSD, the write speeds will go down as more and more data is written to it. There is a definite need for TRIM and other garbage collection. When Windows 7 identifies the drive as a SSD, it enables the TRIM command for the drive when files are deleted from it. The TRIM command tells the SSD controller to delete the pages on the NAND flash block when the user deletes the data. The entire block containing the data is copied into the memory cache and then the block is erased. After this procedure, the data without the user-deleted part is rewritten back to the block from the memory cache. This results in longer delete times, but allows the write performance to remain nearly like-new.

Secure Erase and Performance Degradation

A secure erase restores your drive to a like-new state where each cell is effectively zeroed out. So its performance would be like-new also as if it was fresh out of the box. Simply cloning over from an HDD to SSD would not zero out the cells like a secure erase would. This is because you’re not guaranteed to be writing over the same cells. In a clone, information is just being transferred over, not like erasing a cell first and then writing to it. On a premium SSD such as OWC’s Mercury EXTREME Pro6 G , there is simply no need to secure erase periodically, but whenever you format or re-image your drive, it’s probably a good idea.

This is perhaps the most detailed yet simplified step-by-step way to secure erase your SSD – something you must do (for safety) if you ever sell it. Be aware that your SSD’s BIOS may have some sort of mechanism that prevents the secure erase tool from detecting the SSD for secure erase.

Let’s check out our test bed.