OWC Mercury Electra 6G SATA 3 SSD 240GB Review – Anvil Storage Utilities Beta

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITY PROFESSIONAL (BETA)

Over the last few SSD reviews, we have been introducing our readers to a new benchmark program called Anvil Storage Utilities which is an absolutely amazing program when it comes to benchmarking solid state drives.  Not only does it have a preset SSD benchmark, but also, it has included such things as endurance testing and threaded I/O read, write and mixed tests, all of which are very simple to understand and utilize in our benchmark testing.  Lets take a look at the Anvil Pro SSD Test result for the OWC Electra:

Specific things that we see included with this software is automatic identification of, not only your system specs but also, information relating to the SSD being tested.  Unlike any others that we know of, the Anvil Pro provides the results of all disk transfer tests in both IOPS and MB/s, also indicating the response time and total MB read.  Looking specifically at the 4K QD16, we were very impressed with the result of 77,855.60 IOPS which trumps just about every toher SSD tested to date.  Lets manually switch setting to see what we can pull off:

Here we stuck with 4k random write disk access and increased the queue depth to 32 and then 64 to see if it might hinder the drive at all.  Remarkably, we pulled the IOPS a bit higher.

In the last test, we decided to remain at 4k with a random IO and it still climbed to 79469 which is an excellent representation of what the drive is capable of.  I am going to take the opportunity here to link this thread at XtremeSystems.Org as Anvil, the author of this new benchmark software, has started SSD endurance testing unlike anything that we have seen in the SSD arena up to this point.  It wasn’t even a year ago that people were questioning the lifespan of solid state drives and comparing them to listed specifications with predictions of foul.

A good read will explain, not only how manufacturers are determining the lifespan of their SSDs, but also, how SSD end life results are showing these specifications to be very conservative as SSDs are being shown to have a life span much greater than expected.  The thread will also give you a great first hand view of this software’s SSD Endurance Testing in use.

Pg1 – Introduction

Pg2 – Interior Components and Test Protocol

Pg3 – ATTO, Crystal DiskMark and AS SSD Benchmarks

Pg4 – Anvil Storage Utilities Beta

Pg5 – HDTune Pro Testing

Pg6 – PCMark Vantage Comparisons and The Verdict!

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