OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G 240GB 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: Here again the 240 GB Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G leads the way or if not, only slightly off the other drives. One refreshing thing is that OWC publishes the read/write specifications for both compressible and incompressible data which we find with CrystalDiskMark and the scores here exceed those specifications.

PCMark Vantage 7 Professional – Intel P67 Platform

This is our first use of the new PCMark software since they have updated it to version 7 which is specifcially designed for Windows 7. It measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage 7 supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we employed the secondary storage suite. The nice thing about it is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: The Vertex 3 240 GB Max IOPS still holds the top spot across the board here but only by the slimmest of margins over the OWC drive.