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

AnandTech Storage Bench - Light

Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.

On the Light test, the OWC Aura Pro X2 again performs more like an entry-level NVMe SSD, but unlike the Heavy test there isn't a big gap between tiers of NVMe SSDs. The Aura Pro X2 clearly outperforms the older Apple SSD, even in the worst-case scenario of a full drive.

The average latency of the Aura Pro X2 during the Light test is a bit worse than most high-end NVMe SSDs, but isn't high enough to worry about. The 99th percentile latency is rather high for the worst-case test run on a full drive, but this 2ms is only marginally slower than the old Apple drive and is not even the worst we've seen from a SM2262EN drive.

The average read latencies for the Aura Pro X2 on the Light test are competitive with high-end M.2 NVMe drives, though the latency for the full-drive test run is a bit high. The average write latency is clearly higher than typical for high-end NVMe drives, whether the test is run on a full or empty drive.

The high-end NVMe drives almost all have extremely low 99th percentile write latencies on the Light test, and the Aura Pro X2 can't match that performance even when the test is run on an empty drive. For reads, the 99th percentile latency is competitive when the test is run on an empty drive, and is on par with the old Apple SSD when full.

The OWC Aura Pro X2 saves a lot of power relative to the old Apple SSD or the fastest current NVMe SSDs. It doesn't quite match the WD Black SN750's efficiency, but it's better than we expected from a drive with the SM2262EN controller.