Conclusion
The numbers do not lie, and despite the NAND revision the performance of the Mercury Elite Pro 6G 240GB retains high levels of read and write performance, hitting chart topping capabilities of 560 MBps in single drive test results.
Unfortunately 8 drives just will not cut the mustard on a midrange RAID card, despite it possessing one of the best processors available in its price range. With a theoretical maximum of 4.4 GBps read and 4 GBps write performance the drives consistently performed at half or lower of their capabilities in the 8 drive tests.
Initial tests were run at a minimum cluster size and then secure erased and run again at larger sizes. First impressions were very exciting breaking 2 GBps transfer rates, we expected the larger cluster size to reduce the load on the RAID processor and boost performance even more. This did happen but only to the tune of a 10% performance increase which is why the benchmark results above indicate a maximum transfer speed of 2.2 GBps.
Initially disappointed with the final scores, one can really look at this another way. If spending less than 2 grand on a RAID controller card, you can save money and go with less high performance SSDs. HDDs still are not an option though as although data density will increase you will still only be hitting a maximum of about 800 MBps and small file size performance will suffer drastically. When fast storage is an absolute must Solid State Drives are the only way to go.
The price of the 240 GB is currently $349.99 which is about twice what you can spend on a 240 GB SATA 6 Gbps SSD. However, the only other drive that is a direct comparison to this one, and trades blows with it in performance is the MAXIOPs edition drive we reviewed last year. This drive also costs the same. With PC hardware an extra 10-20% performance boost often leads to twice the cost and SSDs are no exception.
The 240 GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G gets the TechREACTION Gold Silicon award as a top tier performance SSD that fits perfectly in a desktop or laptop.
