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Perhaps one of 2011’s most memorable technology accolades will be the introduction of SATA 6Gbps to the computing environment and the flurry of activity as companies jump in feet first to stay abreast of the change. In the SSD world, early entries were seen by Crucial and Intel with their Marvell 9174 controllers while the SandForce SF-2200 series was seen in products of OCZ and OWC who were first out of the gate.
There was a bit of confusion initially, as SandForce itself boasted of its parallel 500MB/s read and write speeds while the consumer was seeing lower from initial offerings not understanding that our movement to 25nm NAND create new barriers in write performance of these drives. Simply reaching the parallel read/write speeds of SandForces specifications isn’t cost effective to the manufacturer with respect to the cost of 25nm now in use which is why we will see lower write performance specifications with lower capacity SSDs.
Our review today is going to examine the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 240 GB SSD and falls on the heels of our report a few weeks back of the OWC 6G 120GB version as well as that of the OCZ a few weeks before that.
