14 DAY TRIAL // Other World Computing, a company well known for its high performance Mac and PC hardware solutions, has just announced that the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE solid state drive was an integral component of a test rig that established a world record in the PCMark Vantage overall point category for a quad-core system.
The record was achieved by the SSD Review HWBot Overclocking team, headed by Paul Alcorn, a storage specialist and overclocker who specializes in RAID/SSD performance benchmarking, using a machine that packed no less than eight such SSDs.
These were all connected together to an Areca 1880ix-12 PCIe 6G SAS RAID controller card and were run in the RAID 0 (stripping) mode.
The rest of the test system was comprised of an Intel Core i7 920 processor that was overclocked to 4461MHz, an EVGA X58 SLI Classified motherboards, 6GB of tri-channel DDR3 RAM run at 1700MHz and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 graphics card.
The whole setup, including the Areca RAID card, was water-cooled to allow for better overclocking headroom.
“We chose the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE SSD for our world record attempt because its 28% over provisioning ensures much better performance over many runs,” said Paul Alcorn, captain of the SSD Review HWBot Overclocking team.
“With the superior performance of OWC SSDs, and the fact that the RE model is specifically tailored for RAID environments, OWC was an obvious partner choice for our record setting test rig.”
The OWC Mercury Extreme Pro RE line of SSDs includes drives with capacities ranging from 50GB to 400GB and all the models are powered by a SandForce SF1200-series controller.
Performance wise, the drives are able to reach sequential read transfer rates of up to 285MB/s and maximum write transfer rates of 275MB/s.
Pricing starts at 179.99 for the 50GB model and goes all the way up to $1619.99 for the 400GB model.