OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 120GB Solid State Drive Review

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system “beeps!” and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's “day to day” OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.


At this point there really isn’t much to say besides we were not surprised in the least by these numbers. One second off the pace of the Inferno might not seem like much but other SandForce drives were able to deliver nearly 10% better performance without too much of a price difference.

Adobe CS3 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!


It is important to remember that Patriot has not yet released their version of the 310 firmware so it is possible that the gap between the drives becomes more pronounced as time goes by. That being said, we had hoped for more from OWC’s product here.