OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 120GB SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark and PCMark Vantage

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 – Intel P67 Platform

Benchmark Results: Again, strong numbers here by the OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G – especially for a SandForce drive which doesn’t typically fare as well with incompressible data employed by this benchmark. The 4k writes were significantly higher than any other SATA 6Gbps drive except the Vertex 3 120GB.

PCMark Vantage 1.0.2.0 – Intel P67 Platform

PCMark Vantage v1.01 measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we stuck with just the HDD suite. The nice thing about PCMark Vantage is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: The scores are very good as we expect to see from the latest generation SandForce drives which consistently have strong showings on this benchmark.