Having cut their teeth with the Apple crowd, OWC isn’t a company that is well known to most PC users. However, with the Mercury Extreme Pro series of SandForce-based SSDs, they’re trying to break into the enthusiast PC market in a big way. In this review we look at the 120GB version to see if it measures up to the competition.
July 22, 2010 09:06 PM
It doesn't make sense to pay a premium for these drives to only be mediocre compared to others. That said, if the price is that much better then I would consider it. At this point though, I'll stick to the top end if I'm going to throw money into a SSD.
Great review btw.
July 23, 2010 11:21 AM
Please note that we have received some new info from OWC which may change the review slightly. We are looking into their claims and changes that have been made to the pricing of their drive in the last few days before editing the review. However, a note has been added to the main page.
Any edits will be clearly indicated in the review.
Thanks for your understanding.
July 24, 2010 03:56 PM
Windows XP needs to be dropped, what's up with American pricing on a Canadian site ? HardwareYanks name change on the horizon ?
July 24, 2010 04:54 PM
XP is a great OS for benchmarking SSDs as TRIM doesn't enter into the equation. TRIM takes overhead that will be variable from bench run to bench run. PLUS XP loads like a dog in comparison to windows 7. THAT is also a good thing when it comes time trials which by their very nature are not exactly measured in milliseconds! I consider XP to be the worst case scenario so there is no surprises (except pleasant ones) when you buy and use one yourself. :)
YMMV
July 24, 2010 05:01 PM
Any edits will be clearly indicated in the review.
Thanks for your understanding.
July 24, 2010 06:05 PM
Basically, we get all of our prices from Froogle with spot checks at Newegg, Fry's and some others. Unfortunately, the Froogle prices for the OWC was about 48 hours out of date and the review went live without taking OWC's price drop into account. Just to be clear, OWC dropped the price of the drive from about $380 to $320 before the review went up and we didn't know about it. It was listed on their site and unfortunately we didn't recheck there.
So the price was lowered and we had to modify our thoughts about it from a price / capacity standpoint.