OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB 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: Surprisingly, the Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240 GB drive posted the best read and write scores as compared to the other drives in our grid. It seems 559.24MB/s is the tops we are going to see – at least on this motherboard.

This test employs compressible data showing the best case scenario in terms of data throughput for the SandForce drives. Let’s have a look at a few others that use incompressible data to see how that impacts the scores.

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: Again, it scores very well here, leading the way with many of the scores or at least coming very close. A large difference can be seen between it and the smaller 120 GB drive, especially on the 4KB random reads and this is where the firmware tweaks are making their presence known.