OWC announces new solid state drive capacities

OWC is now taking orders for other capacities of their outstanding Mercury Extreme solid state drives. See my review and my Real World SSD report.

Red and green at the top are the OWC Mercury Extreme. Certain brands... forget it.

I love the Mercury Extreme. It takes a beating and keeps working at top speed, unlike most other brands/models, all of which have crapped out or seriously degraded under my workload. My Mac Pro is now the smoothest and fastest machine I’ve ever used, utilizing dual Extreme Pro SSDs as a RAID-0 stripe for boot and scratch. My 3.33Ghz quad-core Mac Pro has three of them, and no hard drives, and is whisper quiet and superbly responsive.

The new capacities really come in two flavors:

Extreme Pro RE SSD™ — enterprise grade models intended for extreme duty, utilizing 28% “over provisioning” and suitable for RAID striping. Warranteed for RAID use which is assumed to have a brutal usage pattern 24 X 7 X 365. Capacities of 50/100/200/400GB. This is what I currently use.

Extreme Pro SSD™ — robust model with 7% over provisioning. Not warranteed for striped RAID use (though it will work fine). Capacities of 60/120/240/480GB.

In truth these drives are almost the same thing. The most salient difference is the 28% vs 7% over provisioning, with the 28% intended for RAID-0 stripe usage and extreme duty. Most other brands have 0% over provisioning (for some perspective!).

These drives are what you ant in your MPG Pro Laptop or MPG Photo Workstation.