OWC Mercury Helios 3 TB3 Expansion Chassis Review – Kingston DCP1000 NVMe SSD On Board

REAL WORLD FILE TRANSFER COMPARISON

For our Real World File Transfer Comparison, we have included the OWC Thunderblade V4,  Tekq Rapide TB3 512GB Portable SSD, Glyph USB 3.1 2TB Atom RAID external SSD, ADATA SE730, Samsung T3, and Intel Optane 900P in our testing with the OWC Mercury Helios 3.

Real world data transfer in the OWC Mercury Helios 2 PCIe Expansion Chassis is out standing, remembering of course that we have the worlds fastest SSD, the Kingston DC1000 NVMe SSD, within the Mercury Helios 3.

QUICKBENCH 4.0

Quickbench 4.0 is a PC version of a osMac software program.  Much like ATTO Disk Benchmark, Quickbench throws a number of data files at the mercury helios 3, each being of different size, and returns with varying speed results.

AJA VIDEO SYSTEM DISK TEST

The AJA Video Systems Disk Test is relatively new to our testing and tests the transfer speed of video files with different resolutions and Codec.

PCMARK VANTAGE X64 HDD SUITE

The SSD Review uses benchmark software called PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite to create testing scenarios that might be used in the typical user experience. There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests are complete. The simulations are as follows:

• Windows Defender In Use
• Streaming Data from storage in games such as Alan Wake which allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action
• Importing digital photos into Windows Photo Gallery
• Starting the Vista Operating System
• Home Video editing with Movie Maker which can be very time consuming
• Media Center which can handle video recording, time shifting and streaming from Windows media center to an extender such as Xbox
• Cataloging a music library
• Starting applications

PCMARK VANTAGE RESULTS

We weren’t overly impressed with our PCMark Vantage results and believed these should be much better.  In testing several other Thunderbolt 3 devices as of late, we are beginning to form the opinion that this software might not be the most reliable for such testing.