14 DAY TRIAL // Other World Computing, OWC for short, has just announced a new series of high-performance solid state drives, dubbed the Mercury Electra 6G, which are based on SandForce's second-generation consumer SSD processors.
The drives are meant to target the prosumer market and come as a cheaper alternative to the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSDs.
They are based on the same SandForce SF-2281 controller as their older brother, but this is now paired with slower asynchronous NAND Flash, which enabled OWC to drop the price of these units.
Fortunately, the performance hit isn't as severe as one would think and, at 556MB/s read and 523MB/s sequential write over a SATA 6Gbps interface, the Electra 6G is pretty much able to saturate the theoretical bandwidth available from the SATA bus.
Performance is equally impressive when combined with a 3Gbps SATA connection as OWC says the Electra SSDs are able to achieve 284MB/s read and 268MB/s write sequential transfer speeds.
Maximum random 4K read performance is estimated at 60,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).
“We’re very excited to continue the evolution of our solid state drive line with this new Electra model,” said Larry O’Connor, founder and CEO, Other World Computing.
“We’re being very aggressive in pricing this model to appeal to consumers and prosumers who have yet to make the SSD switch.
“With over 500MB/s of highly reliable performance, the OWC Mercury Electra 6G helps Mac and PC owners make their machines quickly and easily ‘faster in a flash’,” concluded the company's rep.
The Electra 6G will be priced starting at $229 for the 120GB version, while the 240GB and 480GB drives are available for $479 and $929, respectively.
The OCZ Agility 3 and Corsair Force 3 are two alternatives to the OWC Mercury Electra 6G, as both SSDs use a SandForce SF-2281 controller paired together with asynchronous NAND.