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 ESTPerformance Over Time & TRIM
To see how the Mercury Electra behaves when pushed into a corner, I filled the drive with incompressible data and then tortured it with incompressible 4KB random writes (100% LBA space, QD=32) for 60 minutes:
| OWC Mercury Electra 3G MAX 960GB - Resiliency - AS SSD Sequential Write Speed - 6Gbps | |||
| Clean | After Torture | After TRIM | |
| OWC Mercury Electra 3G MAX | 187.5MB/s | 185.0MB/s | 206.7MB/s |
The results I got are rather unusual, although logical; performance does not degrade noticeably when the drive is tortured. The reason for this is the massive capacity and slow random write speed. It takes two hours to just fill the drive with sequential data, so 60 minutes of torturing doesn't even do one full drive write. IOmeter showed the random write speed to be around 20MB/s, which equals 72GB of host writes in 60 minutes. For comparison, most SandForce drives are writing at over 100MB/s at the end of the torture, so that works out to be ~360GB in one hour.
It seems that TRIM actually improved performance, but I don't believe that's true. The problem with the 960GB Mercury Electra is that it cannot be secure erased due to the internal RAID controller. Hence we had to do sequential write passes to restore performance after every test, which unfortunately doesn't lead to as ideal a scenario as secure erase. Moreover, I saw huge performance variation when running AS-SSD multiple times. I reran AS-SSD straight after the post-TRIM run and write speed was only 132.7MB/s. A third run was ~190MB/s again so it's hard to draw any clear conclusions.
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cyrusfox - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I sort of get it, this thing is kind of affordable but in a year, with next gen Nand available128Gb/16GB), all prices will continue to crash($/gb). And high storage nand in 2.5" form factor is not all that unique. OCZ has had a 1tb drive out since at least may (OCT1-25SAT3-1T), which can be found on newegg or amazon. When you are already spending more than a grand for a drive, might as well grab one that is at least 6 Gbps compatible.Either drive will depreciate faster than is acceptable for me. I am still waiting for a $130 fire sale on an Vertez 4 256gb though, right now I have a poor mans raid 0 of a 128gb vertex 4 and a 120gb Agility 3, both of which I paid $140 plus for awhile ago. Its just as bad as when I spent $100 for 4gb of DDR3 3yrs ago. Buyers remorse, the cost of adopting tech early.
SpaceRanger - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
If this thing is for Audio and Video Professionals, then it's more than likely targeted for Mac users. Mac users are well known for overpaying for their hardware, so the price for this piece of steaming pile is fitting.ajp_anton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
You really need to fix your chart making when performance is very low.If the performance number doesn't fit the bar, move it next to it instead of overlapping with the product name.
I commented on this years ago but nothing's happened. We don't often see the bars go so low, but sometimes they do.
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Our CMS makes the graphs automatically so I can't play with small details like where the actual number is placed. I'll pass a word to Anand and see if there is a way to fix it, because I find that irritating as well.JarredWalton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Actually, there is a way to do this Kristian: check the "outer labels" box at the top-right of the graph. I've fixed the two random write charts and regenerated.ajp_anton - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
Thanks, hopefully all of you remember to do this when necessary (looks like it requires manual work).For consistency between different charts, you should either make this the default, or change it so it only places them outside for too small values. Maybe even for all values below 50% of the largest.
Juddog - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I don't buy that they couldn't afford to put a SATA6G connection on there. The price is already through the roof and newer SSD's hit way past the normal limits of SATA3G (some even bump up against the SATA6G limit).Kristian Vättö - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
OWC didn't exactly specify why they had to stick with SATA 3Gbps, they only said it was a combination of things including price, thermals and space. I wouldn't be surprised if there simply was no SATA 6Gbps controller as the market for such controllers is fairly small. I know Silicon Image doesn't have one, at least.dave_the_nerd - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
I have a Macbook with an HDD + SSD in an optical bay adapter, but I'd sooner duct tape an external drive to the back of the lid that overspend on something like this.Hell, I'd rather install a pair of WD Blacks and software RAID them.
Audio doesn't need as much sequential I/O as video, though, I guess.
Somebody will buy it though.
JonBendtsen - Thursday, October 18, 2012 - link
What if they used JBOD or linear raid rather than raid0?