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 ESTFinal Words
The 960GB Mercury Electra is definitely a niche product and I can only see one scenario where it can easily be justified: you have a laptop or other computer with very limited storage capabilities and you want an SSD with as much capacity as possible. In any other case, it will be cheaper and more sensible to use hard drives or multiple SSDs. Desktop users should have absolutely no need for 1TB SATA SSDs because all of Intel's and AMD's recent desktop chipsets (except Intel H61) come with six native SATA ports. Even if one of the ports is used up by the optical drive, there are five left, which gives you 2.5TB of SSD space if you put a 512GB SSD in every port. If that's not enough, $30 will buy you a PCIe SATA card with two ports and give you 1TB more SSD storage. Depending on your motherboard, you may be able to add several PCIe cards, so only the sky is the limit here.
Laptops usually have only one 2.5" hard drive bay (though it may be possible to add another one by removing the optical drive), which significantly limits the storage options. Externally you can add terabytes of storage but if your usage requires mobility, you will want to avoid carrying any extra devices as much as possible. When you're limited to having only one 2.5" drive, making the decision between an SSD and a hard drive can be difficult if you need a lot of storage. With SSDs, you get speed but pay a premium and are limited to 512GB with a few exceptions. Hard drives are slow but cheap and available in bigger capacities. Where the 960GB Electra makes sense is if you need more than 512GB of space and SSD-level IO performance.
However, the need for speed is a must. A 1TB 2.5" hard drive costs around $100, which is over $1000 less than what the 960GB Mercury Electra currently costs. You must really be able to benefit from the increased IO performance to justify spending that much on a drive. Normally I don't find comparing hard drives and SSDs to be very reasonable but the Mercury Electra is not the fastest SSD. Random IO performance is obviously better, but not as much as it could be since that is the biggest weakness of the Mercury Electra. Sequential throughput can be over twice as fast compared to a similar size 2.5" hard drive but that is only a twofold increase, whereas the increase in price is over tenfold.
Another important aspect to remember is power consumption and battery life: the 960GB Mercury likes electrons, a lot. At idle it draws around as much power as most SSDs draw under full load, and power consumption under load is among the highest as well. It's likely that the 960GB Mercury will shorten your battery life compared to a hard drive or other SSDs, which should be kept in mind if the drive is put into a laptop.
While the 960GB Mercury Electra is not a revolutionary product, it's great to see OWC putting out yet another unique product. Most SandForce SSD OEMs are way too similar: all have two or three SSDs with different NAND and form factor. There is no real differentiation. OWC is at least trying to be different and catering markets that others aren't (for example replacement SSDs for MacBook Airs), and the 960GB Mercury Electra is yet another fruit of that.
The only things I would want from the 960GB Mercury Electra are SATA 6Gbps support and higher random read/write performance. At over $1000, there is a significant premium in terms of price per GB compared to 512GB SSDs and you're only getting SATA 3Gbps—and not even good SATA 3Gbps performance, really. Then again, we are talking about a niche product with no real competitors, so the people who want such a product should be ready to pay the premium.
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kmmatney - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
For most users, the "Light Workload" benchmark is probably the best indicator of real life performance, and here it performs close to a Crucial M4 running at 3Gbps. So not completely terrible (will feel much faster than any hard drive) but you really need to be using a 6Gbps controller to be competitive nowadays.ForeverAlone - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Bloody hell, they're fast!To everyone who is moaning about £/GB or SSD storage, you are idiots for even considering using an SSD for storage.
HKZ - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Maybe for big projects and similar things it's pretty dumb for a regular user, but with games about 10GB or so even on a 256GB SSD you can stuff a lot of games on there!HKZ - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I have an OWC 240GB SSD SATA 3, and it's pretty fast, but at 1TB of space at this price this performance is dismal. I'm saving up for a Samsung 830 (maybe an 840) for the extra space and speed. I only use about 60GB of that 240 for OS X, and the rest for Windows 7. With a 512GB I'd have all kinds of space for my games. Yes, I game on a MacBook and I know it's not the best but it's all I've got right now. Don't kill me in the comments! XDI've got that SSD and a 1TB HDD taking the optical drive spot in my 2011 MBP and there's no way I'd pay a third of the price of my already very expensive machine for an SSD that slow. Someone will buy it, but I can't wait for an affordable 1TB SSD.
Lord 666 - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Think as an iSCSI target for VSA or DAS using an older but still relevant HP DL380 G6 or G7. The 3g connection will be fine and overall performance will be much faster than 1tb SATA not to mention much cheaper than 1tb SAS.JarredWalton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
But will it be reliable long-term? That's someone no one really knows without extended testing in just such a scenario.poccsx - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Not a criticism, just curious, why is the Samsung 840 not in the benchmarks?Kristian Vättö - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
I made the graphs before we had the 840, that's why (but then this got pushed back due to the 840/Pro reviews). You can always use Bench to compare any SSD to anotherciparis - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
- it's not affordable- it's not remotely efficient
- it's quite slow
This seems like a company out of it's depth, producing a product it should have cancelled outright when the numbers became clear (it's no wonder they don't want to talk about them). Note that I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming these numbers weren't what they set out to create; if I'm wrong about that it's perhaps even more damning.
melgross - Friday, October 19, 2012 - link
You shouldn't assume, because you don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a fair amount of demand for this in a laptop despite the price, performance or power draw. Some laptops have a pretty good battery life around 7 hours or so that would still have decent battery life with one of these.OWC is right that this is a good job for video editing on a laptop, and professional use for dailies in the field would be a perfect use for this.
As far as criticism of the performance goes, I remember plenty of guys here talking about how they were going to buy drives a year or two ago that had performance that was much worse for much smaller drives at a higher price per Gb. If you're loading or saving fairly large projects, a doubling of performance is very significant.
Of course, if you never have done any of that, you won't understand it either.