OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 120GB SSD Review

ATTO & Iometer Synthetic Benchmarks

ATTO v2.41

ATTO is one of the oldest drive benchmarks still being used today and is still very relevant in the SSD world. ATTO measures transfers across a specific volume length. It measures raw transfer rates for both reads and writes and places the data into graphs that can be very easily interpreted. The test was run with the default runs of 0.5kb through 8192kb transfer sizes with the total length being 256mb.

ATTO – Intel P67 Platform

Benchmark Results: As expected the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G performs very much like the Vertex 3 drives and posted the best single drive read score we’ve seen to date of 559.24 MB/s which is dead on the specification given by OWC. That also appears to be the extent of the SATA III bandwidth because we are seeing many scores cap out there.

Iometer 2008 (1.1.0)

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation who has since discontinued work on Iometer and it was ultimately turned over to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). We chose the file sizes that best reflect many of the Windows transactions. 4KB random read/writes is very common on every day user machines. Large sequential writes represent large file copies. The drive block size is 512kb so it should give a very good indication of peak performance. We set the queue depth to 4 for the tests as generally Windows operations tend to happen at queue depths of 5 or less.

Benchmark Results: Solid scores all the way around here although the 4 KB scores aren’t quite as impressive as we saw with the Intel 320 Series or the Crucial/Micron drives. Again, numbers posted were very similar to the Vertex 3 120GB.