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

AnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy

Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.

The average data rates for the OWC Aura Pro X2 on the Heavy test are not competitive with other current high-end NVMe drives, but at least it avoids the horrible full-drive performance we've seen from other SM2262EN drives. And it is still substantially faster than the older Apple SSD, for both full and empty drive test runs.

The 99th percentile latency problems with the Aura Pro X2 show up again on the Heavy test, but these would still be reasonable scores for a SATA SSD; it doesn't suffer like a full Intel 660p. Average latency is sub-par for what should be a high-end NVMe SSD, but is still an improvement over the older Apple drive and the current entry-level NVMe drives.

The average read and write latencies for the Aura Pro X2 are both a clear improvement over the Apple SSD but are nothing special compared to high-end M.2 NVMe SSDs.

The OWC Aura Pro X2 has competitive QoS for read operations when the Heavy test is run on an empty drive, but when full the 99th percentile read latencies degrade to entry-level NVMe performance. The 99th percentile write latencies are poor for both test runs.

The Aura Pro X2 again ends up with pretty good power efficiency, coming close to the WD Black SN750 that sets the standard to beat for high-end NVMe drives. The Apple SSD stands out with much higher energy consumption than even the most power-hungry of the modern high-end M.2 drives, and to complete the Heavy test it requires more than twice the energy that the OWC drive uses.