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OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 PCI Express SSD Drive
Filed Under (Apple, Hardware, Product Review, Technology) by admin on 18-05-2013
Tagged Under : accelsior, accelsior_e2, blade, macsales, macsales.com, mercury, OWC, PCIe, SSD
I just picked up a great new product, the OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2. It’s basically 2 x raided SSD drives on a PCIe card that goes in my Mac Pro. The Mac Pro has been the top of the line POWER beast in Apples hardware lineup for years but also hasn’t been upgraded in years. More an more Mac Pro owners are looking for ways to pep up their Mac Pro to make it last a little longer until the next great Mac Pro is released, which will hopefully be soon.
In any event, I received the Accelsior in 2 days from http://www.macsales.com which is one in the same with OWC or Other World Computing. Larry has been running OWC for many years now and has always offered great products to help you upgrade your Macs, whether it be ram, hard drives, video cards, etc, so definitely check them out for great products at great prices.
The Accelsior I picked up was the 240gb model which has 2 x 120gb ssd blades like those used in the MacBook Air. The key ingredient in this product though is that it runs on the PCIe bus, not through SATA which on the mac pro is still 2.0 and not very fast. Another cool feature is that the E2 also offers you 2 x 600mbps eSATA slots.
Now to the numbers. My standard 1gb 7200rpm drive received under 70MB/s on both Read and Write operations using the Blackmagic Design disk speed test application while the new Accelsior received 608.1MB/s on Read operations and 492.8MB/s on Write operations. Below are the screen captures for each…
OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 240gb PCIe Card
Standard 1gb 7200rpm SATA Drive
In conclusion, my Mac Pro has a whole new life. I have installed my startup disk on the Accelsior and boot times have gone from about 1 minute to around 22 secs. Its absolutely amazing. I also have all of my applications running on the Accelsior so they spring to life almost immediately after clicking them. I also do a lot of video editing and it is a dream to work off of this drive.
I highly recommend this to any Mac Pro owner. It’s a no brainer. If a new Mac Pro comes out you can simply unplug it and put it in your new machine. Kudos to Larry for staying ahead of the curve as per usual. Another great product from a great company, Other World Computing rocks!
On a side note, these reviews are my personal opinions and have not been the result of any discount for this product. I paid full price for this product and I do not review products that were given to me. Rest assured what you find in this review is fact and my opinion was not bought.
