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OWC Mercury Extreme Enterprise SSD announced today... are better specs available?

I'm a little confused after reading this thread.. I saw on a review site that OWC just updated their firmware to resolve the sleep/hibernate issue on Friday. Is that not the case? Are there still major issues with the OWC Mercury Extreme? I was considering buying one, but don't want to have problems if the controller is still buggy.
 
zifty said:
I'm a little confused after reading this thread.. I saw on a review site that OWC just updated their firmware to resolve the sleep/hibernate issue on Friday. Is that not the case? Are there still major issues with the OWC Mercury Extreme? I was considering buying one, but don't want to have problems if the controller is still buggy.
Click to expand...

I have not had any issues at all with my OWC drive but to be fair I've only had the drive installed since last Friday. I believe my drive does have the new firmware as the system info shows the drive at rev 305..., which I believe coresponds to the 3.05 firmware. If someone knows how to check the actual firmware rev please let me know. The article on Anandtech does seem to indicate that performance may be down somewhat from the original firmware but my Geekbench results don't look that much lower then Silvermails, who has the original firmware. The drive is still blazingly fast, it may be that the lost performance shows up in benchwarks but not so much in realworld usage. I should note that I do have hybrrnation disabled. This was not done due to any issues with the drive but because I don't want to loose 8GB of SSD space backing up my RAM.
 
Oh, also is the new firmware available for download anywhere? Didn't read it anyway and I hope I don't need to send the drive back just for a reflash...
 
I received samples Friday of the OWC Mercury Extreme SSD with the newest firmware. I'm getting the same killer speeds that I got with the last firmware release:
http://barefeats.com/hard130.html

I've seen some discussion about what constitutes an enterprise SSD processor. In the case of Sandforce, the SF-1200 and SF-1500 are both enterprise class processors. The SF-1000 is consumer class. OWC uses enterprise class to provide performance without write speed degradation experienced by other SSDs.

In a soon-to-be posted SSD shootout that includes Apple's CTO 512G SSD and the Crucial RealSSD 6Gb/s, I will go into more detail on what's different about the 1200 and 1500.
 
barefeats said:
I received samples Friday of the OWC Mercury Extreme SSD with the newest firmware. I'm getting the same killer speeds that I got with the last firmware release:
http://barefeats.com/hard130.html

I've seen some discussion about what constitutes an enterprise SSD processor. In the case of Sandforce, the SF-1200 and SF-1500 are both enterprise class processors. The SF-1000 is consumer class. OWC uses enterprise class to provide performance without write speed degradation experienced by other SSDs.

In a soon-to-be posted SSD shootout that includes Apple's CTO 512G SSD and the Crucial RealSSD 6Gb/s, I will go into more detail on what's different about the 1200 and 1500.
Click to expand...
My understanding is that the only hardware difference between the SF1500 and the SF1200 is that the 1500 has a supercap and is rated for 10,000,000 hours while the SF1200 is sans supercap and rated for 2,000,000. Firmware differs in that the 4k random write performance is lower on the 1200, 10K IOPS vs 30K IOPS. Not sure that there would be much realworld difference in consumer applications.
 
bob5820 said:
My understanding is that the only hardware difference between the SF1500 and the SF1200 is that the 1500 has a supercap and is rated for 10,000,000 hours while the SF1200 is sans supercap and rated for 2,000,000. Firmware differs in that the 4k random write performance is lower on the 1200, 10K IOPS vs 30K IOPS. Not sure that there would be much realworld difference in consumer applications.
Click to expand...

I understand the 1500 also consumes more power to help it perform more write transactions per second.
 
I've contacted OWC and they mentioned I will need to RMA the drive. Bummer...will see how it goes and update everyone again.
 
bob5820 said:
Not sure that there would be much realworld difference in consumer applications.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure there's much of a noticeable difference either. I just don't like the fact that the drive is changing but OWC is not making it clear to customers. It's a little sketchy, and definitely uncool in my opinion.
 
2010 MacBook Pro SSD comparison

I just got a 15" MacBook Pro, Intel i7 2.66GHz, 8GB RAM with Apple's 256GB SSD. FYI, the Apple 256GB SSD is a Toshiba drive.

After migrating all of my data to the system, I ran XBench with the Apple drive and got these results:

Total score for Disk Test: 299.69
Sequential
Uncached write: 177.05 MB/sec [4k blocks]
Uncached write: 165.68 MB/sec [256k blocks]
Uncached read: 30.03 MB/sec [4k blocks]
Uncached read: 184.38 MB/sec [256k blocks]
Random
Uncached write: 32.26 MB/sec [4k blocks]
Uncached write: 154.73 MB/sec [256k blocks]
Uncached read: 14.05 MB/sec [4k blocks]
Uncached read: 124.97 MB/sec [256k blocks]

I then cloned the drive using SuperDuper to the OWC 200GB Mercury Extreme and installed it in the machine. I re-ran the test and got the following results:

Total score for disk test: 323.28
Sequential
Uncached write: 181.02 MB/sec [4k]
Uncached write: 155.16 MB/sec [256k]
Uncached read: 92.61 MB/sec [4k]
Uncached read: 183.00 MB/sec [256k]
Random
Uncached write: 139.03 MB/sec [4k blocks]
Uncached write: 158.43 MB/sec [256k blocks]
Uncached read: 21.42 MB/sec [4k blocks]
Uncached read: 176.68 MB/sec [256k blocks]

Overall, the OWC Extreme drive does performs about the same or better, with the Toshiba drive besting it slightly in two of the sequential tests. It seems the OWC really excels on the random access, which is more useful and common than large sequential access.

Once nice surprise with the OWC - after formatting, I had 199.7GB of usable disk space. The Toshiba model was not the same -- it was billed as 256GB, but only 250GB were accessible. Of course, the OWC is really a 256GB drive with 56GB used for data integrity, but at least you're left with the same amount of usable space as what the drive is sold as.

Lastly, I ordered the OWC drive on Sunday and received one with the firmware revision number 305A13F0 -- which based upon other posts would seem to be the 3.05 version that fixes the sleep/hibernate issue.
 
barefeats published their shootout comparing the OWC SSD to a couple of Crucial SSD models, the Vertex SSD, Apple's 512GB SSD, and 5400rpm and 7200rpm hard drives.

If you have a hard drive in your MacBook Pro and don't plan to go SSD, you probably don't want to look at these results! Otherwise, have a tissue ready.... It's enough to make hard drive lovers cry! :)

http://www.barefeats.com/mbpp19.html

Mark
 
I just wanted to let you know that I received my Corsair F200
1200 controller drive yesterday. It's incredibly fast, but...
yeah, there are some sleep issues. I have tried both hibernate modes
and there are some random crashes.
I'm sending it back and waiting for this to be fixed. The drive is amazing,
got ~275 xbench score, 7-sec boot time, 2-sec first PS launch (!!!).
But with the sleep issue it's kind of pointless, I'm not gonna get stuck
with it for a couple of years...

Andrew
 
Mark Booth said:
My buddy Robert (barefeats) tells me that XBench is outdated. Use QuickBench 4 instead.

Mark
Click to expand...

That's totally correct. XBench, QuickBench, and IOMeter all yield different numbers, so it's had to compare benchmarks unless you use the exact same hardware and software setup...
 
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