OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 120GB Solid State Drive Review

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSD based drives. The main reason we include it is to show what under perfect conditions a given drive is capable of; but the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.


As you can see the read speed of this SandForce drive about average for an SF-1222 product. Yes, there is a small difference between the Mercury and its competition but it really isn't anything to be overly concerned about.

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.


Unfortunately, what we are seeing here are some slightly disappointing minimum numbers while the average numbers look to be right within the margin of error for a Sandforce-based drive.