While the Accelsior certainly may find traction amongst the enthusiast computing audience, the core driver for this type of performance is around the creative professional space. By default the drives ship in a RAID0 configuration which offers throughput around 800MB/s users also have ability to switch to RAID1 for data redundancy, or JBOD mode to access the individual drives. OWC also provides options for the user which are unique. The architecture itself isn’t novel, but OWC’s implementation is, using in-house components and engineering to make the Accelsior come to life. OWC uses a unique design, essentially leveraging a PCIe PCB with two host slots for their gumstick-shaped SSDs and a management controller that ties the drives together. These drives are what you want in your MPG Pro Laptop or MPG Pro Workstation.The OWC Mercury Accelsior is a PCIe SSD designed for the enthusiast and creative professional market who crave the fastest storage available within a client workstation. Most other brands have 0% over provisioning (for some perspective!). The most salient difference is the 28% vs 7% over provisioning, with the 28% intended for RAID-0 stripe usage and extreme duty. In truth these drives are almost the same thing. Not warranteed for striped RAID use (though it will work fine). This is what I currently use.Įxtreme Pro SSD™ - robust model with 7% over provisioning.

Warranteed for RAID use which is assumed to have a brutal usage pattern 24 X 7 X 365. The new capacities really come in two flavors:Įxtreme Pro RE SSD™ - enterprise grade models intended for extreme duty, utilizing 28% “over provisioning” and suitable for RAID striping. My 3.33Ghz quad-core Mac Pro has three of them, and no hard drives, and is whisper quiet and superbly responsive. 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. 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.

Red and green at the top are the OWC Mercury Extreme. See my review and my Real World SSD report. OWC is now taking orders for other capacities of their outstanding Mercury Extreme solid state drives. SEND FEEDBACK Related: Other World Computing, RAID, SSD

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