OWC Premium SandForce-Based Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 240GB SSD is Blazing Fast!
Conclusion
As we concluded last year, SSD technology is still one of the most rapidly improving while their price is dropping. With more and more motherboard manufacturers offering SATA 3 6Gb/s ports, the ceiling for maximum transfer speeds for disk drives has been nearly doubled from the SATA 2 3Gb/s standard. We have seen the SSD develop improved new controllers that bring faster speeds and now we have found the fastest one that we have tested so far – the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G.
We have watched SSD technology get slowly cheaper over time and it is much more accessible to the regular consumer and not just for enthusiasts. Since last year’s Thailand floods which crippled HDD production, many consumer-grade SSDs have dipped below the $1-per-gigabyte MSRP pricing regularly and sales frequently go well below this pricing once considered breakthrough. The OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G series offers a solid bang-for-buck value for consumers who will not accept any compromise with performance. At $295 the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G is faster than Kingston’s premium $400+ HyperX 240GB SSD.
It is absolutely not “mandatory” to have a SSD if you use your PC only for gaming. A hardcore gamer would more likely save his money by buying a large fast mechanical drive and upgrading his graphics instead. A 1TB drive can again be had for $50 on sale. Mechanical HDDs have got quite fast for gaming and their only disadvantage compared to the SSD is waiting a second or two longer for your autosave to load; or longer for an entire level to load. However, if a gamer is impatient and wants to get right back into the game, then the SSD will definitely improve immersion and decrease frustration.
With a low-capicity drive SSD , gamers will constantly be installing new games and uninstalling them after playing them to make room for even newer games. At 240GB, many gamers will be satisfied with the amount of storage and it is a good compromise size for a performance conscious gamer with $300 to spend on a premium SSD.
Pros
- The SSD is of a magnitude faster than the mechanical hard drive in almost every way. Windows startup is blazing fast and shutdown is noticeably quicker!
- OWC’s Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G is simply the overall fastest SSD that we have tested!
- At $295 the OWC 240GB Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSD price is more than $100 less than the Kingston 240GB HyperX drive although the OWC is the faster SSD.
- TRIM support and garbage collection keeps your drive “like new”. OWC SSDs offer advanced wear-leveling technology, S.M.A.R.T. tools and DuraClass Technology.
- 240GB is sufficient for most gamers who can juggle their game library between their storage HDD and the SSD; perhaps keeping up to ten of their favorite/current games on the SSD.
- Designed and assembled in America!
- 5-year warranty is far beyond the industry usual three-years, and superb OWC support stand it out from the “SSD crowd”. Evidently OWC is a must have for Mac computing.
Cons
- Price per GB is still high compared to mechanical hard drives.
- Limited storage compared to HDDs
The 240GB OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G deserves the ABT Editor’s Choice award. It is a superb drive for the enthusiast who demands a blazing-fast SSD without compromise and doesn’t mind its limited capacity. At $295 it is also very good value, outperforming the much more expensive premium $400 240GB Kingston HyperX SSD. This OWC SSD is also highly recommended as a time and frustration saver in starting up and shutting down Windows and for anything to do with file access, copying, or loading game levels.
Our 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives continue to perform admirably and demonstrate improvements in every way over our older 7200.10 drives. We even filled our drives to capacity as we tested over 80 games for our original 3D Vision evaluation, and they still perform as they did over a year ago when they were less than half-filled! They are awesome for storage and we will upgrade them to 1TB drives as we are already feeling capacity constrained by our 28-game benchmark suite.
It pays in every way to keep up with ABT. Expect a Newer Tech HDD/SSD dock, a Genius PC speaker review, and Mario will have a new Thermaltake Level 10 mouse evaluation coming shortly.
You can even join us as we conduct experimental benching using frame times and a high speed digital camera to determine gaming “smoothness” on ABT forum. And we shall revisit gaming performance using OWC’s Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB SSD to see if there is any difference in gaming performance by using hard drives and comparing multiple SSDs.
Mark Poppin
ABT Senior Editor
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