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BENCHMARKS
When we stated that these two drives were identical except for the over provisioning and that the performance didn’t suffer whatsoever, we weren’t kidding. Both drives resulted in extremely similar results in testing with Crystal Disk Mark and ATTO Disk Benchmark and it wasn’t until our HDTune and subsequent PCMark Vantage scoring that we could see that the drives did differ slightly. The overall scoring of PCMark Vantage, as seen below, was actually a real shock.
Extreme Pro 120Gb Extreme Pro RE 100 Gb
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Once again this brings us to the claim from OWC that their drives suffer no degradation whatsoever when filled or with constant use. The drive on the left has been in for about a month and a half and one cannot ask for much better results than that. The high sequential reads and writes are great numbers for the consumer to determine exactly which ssd is best for them but the educated consumer will remember from our last review that its the 4kb random writes that will give you the most visible performance boost for your buck. This method of disk access is utilized on a constant basis in typical PC use whereas the high scores which represent large sequential reads and writes are seldom, if ever used in typical use.
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So, lets deviate for a second and see how far we have come in just 3 years. Lets throw out 3 Crystal Disk Mark scores, one for a SeAgate Momentus hard drive, the other for the first 64Gb Samsung ssd released and of course the third would be the Extreme Pro 120Gb from a new install. Can you guess which one is which? Yup…you got it! Remember to look at the random 4 kb scores because they will afford the most visible bang for your buck. If you do just a bit of calculation you will see that the random 4kb writes of our OWC test drive are actually 72 times faster than the Seagate that is still popular today. Do we think we would notice that little difference difference?
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For the remainder of the tests, we will simply show the Extreme Pro drive on the left with OWCs Pro ‘RE’ version to its right. We have to concede though that if performance alone is going to be your deciding criteria, the Extreme Pro will hook you not only for its price, but also, the increased storage capacity that comes along with it. Off the bench we could not find a test that could easily tell the two apart.
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Extreme Pro 120Gb Extreme Pro RE 100 Gb
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1. ATTO Disk Benchmark Ver. 2.46
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2. HDTune Pro Ver. Benchmark
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As similar as both drives are, we were surprised to find the spikes of the Pro drive, lower burst rate as well as .2ms access time vice .1ms. In practical use there was nothing whatsoever that depicted the differences between the performance of either drive.
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3. HDTune Pro Ver. 4.01 Random Access
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4. PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite
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This software is utilized to compare the OWC and the Intel SSDs in benchmarks which imitate normal user activities. A set of eight different tests are described below, the result of each being a measure of drive speed to complete the activity. The overall Vantage HDD Suite Score of the OWC RE was a 27983 whereas the Intel was 23124. Surprisingly, the OWC Extreme Pro 120Gb, which technically should have had lower marks than the OWC RE 100Gb, ruled here with an overall score of 30341 as a result of the following tests:
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