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REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
The OWC Mercury Electra MAX 6G’s performance throughout our testing wasn’t amazing, but still good to say the least. It was able to achieve sequential speeds of over 520MB/s read and almost 500MB/s write, QD1 4K random performance was decent as well access times during our synthetic tests. We did notice, however, that during higher QD workload this SSD simply could not keep up. There was hardly any improvement as the QD increased. This is most likely due to it not supporting native command queuing with the integrated RAID controller. Though many consumer workloads don’t necessarily need NCQ to help improve performance, those looking for a high capacity SSD for media work, which often times will increase to a QD of 4-10, will see this as a slight let down.
This blatantly visible in its PCMark Vantage and 8 performance results. During Vantage it was only able to achieve a score of 51K and during PCMark 8’s consistency testing its performance put it near the end of the pack. For heavy workloads, other SSD options may be more advisable over the 2TB OWC Mercury Electra MAX 6G.
Finally, during our file transfer and power testing, we saw that OWC Mercury Electra MAX 6G was not all that impressive. It averaged a file transfer speed of 347MB/s, much lower than many other MLC powered SSDs and more in line with what a TLC SSD may deliver, as can be seen with the 1TB MyDigitalSSD BP5e. Power consumption is also very high compared to normal single controller SATA SSDs. Idle is a whopping 1.9W! That is 10-20 times that of a normal SATA SSD! Not only that, but during our testing, it consumed a max of nearly 8W, which is about 2W more than other SATA SSDs we have tested. Furthermore, during our file transfer test, we noted an average consumption of over 6W, which is also 2-3 times that of a normal SSD. Power consumption efficiency is definitely a tradeoff for capacity for the 2TB OWC Mercury Electra MAX 6G.
FINAL THOUGHTS
At the price of $690, that puts the 2TB OWC Mercury Electra MAX 6G at around $0.35 per GB, which isn’t too bad considering you are also paying a slight premium for capacity, however, we can’t forget about the other options out there. The main two that immediately come to mind would be the Samsung 850 Pro and EVO SSDs. Both are available in 2TB capacities and the EVO is priced very competitively, undercutting the OWC Mercury Electra MAX 6G by about $50. On top of better pricing it also delivers better performance, which is especially beneficial during heavier workloads such as video editing. Another option would be the Eluktronics 2TB Eluktro Pro. At $550, though we haven’t tested put it through its paces, it could potentially be a much better value as well.
Overall, the 2TB OWC Mercury Electra MAX 6G delivers decent performance, but not all that impressive. Because of its dual controller design it isn’t as efficient as many other SSDs and for the performance it delivers we believe that it is slightly over priced for what it is. If you are a laptop user, you will definitely want to look elsewhere. If it is an SSD you are considering to purchase, check around to see if there are any other options to weigh out. You might be able to find a better deal elsewhere.
What a pointless config. Not only this is more expensive to make, it’s slower than using a single controller.
They should have just went with Phison S10, which natively supports 2TB of storage and is faster than this.
From OWC Mercury Electra 6G I learned that ‘SSD’ actually stands for “Super Sudden Death”. I lost all my stuff, because it died right in the middle of backup. Thank you ‘OWC’. No more anything from OWC in my MBP 13″ late 2011. Never ever!