14 DAY TRIAL // Without making too much fuss about the whole case, OWC brought a series of changes to its high-performance Mercury Extreme Pro 6G series of solid state drives meant to make the units even faster than before.
The most important modification brought to the new revision of the drives is the inclusion of 32nm toggle NAND manufactured by Toshiba.
This is the same high-quality memory used by OCZ in the Vertex 3 Max IOPS as well as by Patriot in the Wildfire and will replace the synchronous 25nm NAND produced by IMFT, which was originally installed in the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G.
The second change brought to the ME Pro 6G only affects the 240GB and 480GB models, which will now come with the SandForce SF-2282 controller.
This is almost identical with the SF-2281 used in the first revision of these SSDs, but can handle 16 byte lanes, where the SF-2281 only support 8 lanes.
Combined with the new high-performance NAND, the 240GB and 480GB versions of the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G could most probably become the fastest single SSD units available right now in the market.
The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G was released at the end of April and the first edition of these solid state drives was capable of reaching transfer speeds in excess of 500MB/s (559MB/s sequential reads and 515MB/s sequential writes), while random 4K file read/writes can reach up to 60,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second).
The series includes three models, which pack 120GB, 240GB and 480GB of storage with 7% over provisioning and all these should feature similar performance since all the 16 memory channels are populated with NAND Flash.
No information regarding the pricing or the availability of the new units was provided. The first generation Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSDs started at $297.99, while the most expensive drive retailed for $569.99. (via StorageReview)