The OWC Aura Pro X2 SSD Review: An NVMe Upgrade For Older Macs

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The OWC Aura Pro X2 performs about the same on The Destroyer as the other SM2262EN-based drive, the HP EX950. These are both fairly slow compared to other current high-end NVMe SSDs, but almost twice as fast as the early Apple PCIe SSD.

The average latency for the Aura Pro X2 on The Destroyer is in line with expectations, but the 99th percentile latency is far higher than the HP EX950 and the older Apple SSD.

The OWC Aura Pro X2 shows more differences from the other SM2262EN drive when the average latency is broken down by reads and writes. For reads, the OWC drive is significantly faster than the HP EX950 and is comparable to the Phison E12-based Silicon Power drive. For writes, the OWC is slower than the EX950 but still well ahead of the Apple SSD and the current entry-level NVMe drives.

The 99th percentile read latency of the Aura Pro X2 on The Destroyer is competitive with other current high-end NVMe drives, but the 99th percentile write latency is a problem: it's a bit worse than the MLC-based Apple SSD, and several times higher than the best current TLC drives.

The OWC Aura Pro X2 is more power efficient than expected, using less energy to complete The Destroyer than most other drives in this batch, while the Apple SSD and the HP EX950 are some of the most power-hungry under load.