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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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.