14 DAY TRIAL // There have been quite a few releases of solid state drives based on the SandForce controller. Among the companies that launched such products are OCZ, A-Data and Viking Modular Solutions. Following in their footsteps is Other World Computing (OWC), a US company that has introduced the Mercury Extreme line of SSDs that claim to be the "the fastest, most reliable, and longest endurance" SSDs on the market.
The new products from OWC boast "up to 100x higher data protection than provided by ordinary SSDs" or enterprise-class hard drives. This is allowed by a combination of the advanced ECC (error correction code) and the RAISE functionality within the SandForce controller, enabling RAID-like data protection and reliability. RAISE stands for Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements.
The SandForce-enabled Mercury Extreme solid state drives also feature read and write speeds of over 260 MB/s (285 MB/s read and 275 MB/s write) with a 0.1 ms latency. This performance, OWC guarantees, won't diminish over the five years of warranty, despite the general tendency of SSDs to suffer performance slowdowns after repeated use.
Another significant benefit brought about by the OWC SSDs is the MTBF of about ten million hours. This corresponds to 8.5 times the endurance of regular solid state drives and is accomplished by a combination of several DuraClass technologies. These include "ultra-efficient block management, state-of-the-art wear leveling, and intelligent 'recycling' for advanced free space management."
"With over 21 years of high performance memory and storage product development experience, we weren't going to bring a SSD to market until we had a solution that would be worthy of wearing the OWC name," Larry O'Connor, CEO, Other World Computing, said. "Over one million customers around the world have come to expect the highest level of performance, quality, and reliability from us. And our customers expect those products to be real and shipping, not just preannounced, so they can immediately begin enjoying newfound performance," O'Connor continued. "From faster boot times, app loading, and overall system responsiveness, our new SSD drive will make any Mac or PC better than new."
The drives will come in storage capacities of 50GB, 100GB and 200GB. They will be accompanied by a five-year warranty and will have respective price tags of $230, $400 and $780.