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OWC 960GB Mercury Electra 3G SSD — Breakthrough SSD Capacity!
Related: diglloydTools, DiskTester, filters, laptop, Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Other World Computing, Photoshop, RAID, RAID-0, SSD
You read that right — 960GB in a single 2.5" SSD.
Which means that in a MacBook Pro (non-Retina), you can now have 1.92 TB of fast SSD storage, using the OWC DataDoubler, say in an MPG Pro Laptop! Of course, a single SSD can be used as well.
The 960GB capacity solves a storage problem for harried on-the-go road warriors who want to take it all with them. It also can be used in a RAID-0 stripe or fault-tolerant RAID-1 mirror (but keep solid backups with a RAID-0 stripe, no matter what brand or kind of drive!).
In a Mac Pro, four of these units would yield 3.6 TB of SSD storage. Not bad.
You can install the 960GB Electra 3G SSD in any Mac except the MacBook Pro with Retina Display*.
OWC has the 960GB Electra 3G SSD available now.
* The MacBook Pro with Retina display cannot use standard 2.5" drives, but the non-Retina models continue to use standard 2.5" drives.
Performance
The 960GB Electra 3G is fast— I tested one and found that for both compressible and incompressible data, very high data rates are maintained, in the ~ 250 MB/sec range.
The speed comes from the fact that internally, the Mercury Electra 960GB SSD is actually a RAID-0 stripe of two SSD devices (with two Sandforce controllers).
While the Mercury Electra 3G SSD is a SATA II 3Gbps device, its data rates for incompressible data (JPEG, PSD, TIF, video, etc) remain not far off the limits of the SATA II ports in the Mac Pro, and compare favorably to single 6G SSDs with respect to incompressible data transfer speeds. And since the Mac Pro has SATA II ports, the 960GB Electra 3G is a great choice for high capacity, and at a substantially lower cost than the higher performing Mercury Accelsior 960GB PCIe SSD.
As a Photoshop scratch disk
The Mercury Electra 960GB SSD was fast enough to beat out the OWC 480GB 6G SSD when used in a Mac Pro as the Photoshop scratch disk, showing that it is an error to assume that a 3G device is slower than a 6G SSD with real tasks.
All variants of the Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD are faster, but that is expected, since the Accelsior has no SATA speed limits as do the standard drive bays. Point is, the Electra 3G 960GB comes in a standard 2.5" drive package, for use in just about any computer (except the latest Apple MacBook Pro Retina, which does not take standard drives).
Sustained transfer rate
Tested with DiskTester (part of diglloydTools), using the DiskTester fill-volume command.
