With the SATA 3 specification being only 2 years old, and the wide availability of SSDs only 2 years more advanced than that, solid state drives have managed to push SATA2 to its limits very quickly. With SATA3 seeing near-universal availability on new motherboards, it is no surprise companies are trying to push the SATA3 interface to its limits.

OWC has just released the Extreme Pro 6Gbps SSD. At 240GB, and sporting some of the most cutting-edge I/O circuitry, it is capable of pushing the SATA3 interface almost to its limits. The advertised speeds for this drive are 559 MBps (read) and and 527 MBps (write). If true, this is nothing short of amazing, considering the theoretical maximum is 600 MBps. Achieving 90% of a spec’s theoretical performance wall is nothing to sneeze at in even the most mature architectures.

Specifications

• 5 Year Warranty
• Mac and PC compatible
• Built in the USA
• Sustained Data Rates up to 559MB/s Read, 527MB/s Write
• Random 4K file read/writes up to 60,000 IOPS

From the drive’s marketing literature:

SandForce DuraWrite and RAISE technologies and use of top quality Tier 1/Grade A, Synchronous NAND Flash provides maximum performance with unrivaled Data Reliability, integrity and longevity.

New 6.0Gbps Performance, same award winning family. Proudly built in the USA and backed by OWC’s unrivaled free lifetime US based support.

The Extreme Pro 6G SSD gets put through the standard battery of tests to determine if it is capable of reaching those speeds, and hopefully gain us all a better understanding of what is going on underneath the skin.

Other World Computing

For those readers that are exclusively into the PC enthusiast market, the name OWC won’t ring any bells. OWC has actually been around for over 20 years; however, they have been primarily an Apple-based peripherals company. With the move to Intel x86 based architecture a few years back, Apple now has even more components that are PC-compatible, and moving into a market hundreds of times larger seems like a good business decision. OWC is making great strides in securing a place at the top of the SSD market based just on the specifications of the Extreme Pro 6G.

Bringing a competitive SSD into the market at a good price will do much for their name, and we expect to see them mentioned more often on PC enthusiast forums.

Next: A Look at Extreme Pro 6G

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