OWC Mercury Viper 6G 3.5" SSD

2013-01-06 • SEND FEEDBACK |
Related: iMac, Mac Pro, Other World Computing, SSD, USB

OWC Mercury Viper 6G 3.5" SSD up to 1920GB

Other World Computing has announced the Mercury Viper 6G SSD:

• 3.5" form factor suitable for iMac or Mac Pro (not for laptops).
• Capacity from 240GB to 1920GB.
• SATA 6G interface (Mac Pro has 3G ports).

The Mercury Viper is a premium solution suitable for highly disk intensive environments. Pricing has not been announced.

Suitability for Mac Pro

The OWC Mercury Viper can be installed in a Mac Pro, but because the Mac Pro SATA ports are 3G, the speed will throttled to 3G speeds (about 270MB/sec for real world file transfers). Which is not slow. The OWC Mercury Accelsior remains the superior choice for a faster internal SSD, because the Accelsior is a PCIe SSD, and thus not subject to the limitations of SATA 3G or 6G.

When and if a new Mac Pro appears, it will presumably have SATA 6G ports, and at that time the Mercury Viper becomes much more attractive for internal use.

Suitability for iMac

The iMac has no PCIe slots, and so a Mercury Viper installed in the internal iMac 3.5" bay should in theory “rock” (not tested).

Any other Mac

Any Mac with USB3 could use the Mercury Viper in a Mercury Elite Pro case via USB3 or eSATA (3G), or in a Thunderbolt case accepting 3.5-inch drives.