Other World Computing, more commonly known as OWC has launched a rather unusual PCI Express SSD that uses a pair of "blades" as the company puts it. The blades appear to be the same type of SSD modules that Apple is using in its MacBook Air, a product which OWC produces upgrade modules for.The Mercury Accelsior PCB is fitted with some kind of RAID chip which enabled the PCI Express card to act as a boot drive in a Mac Pro. OWC goes as far as to claim that this is the only bootable PCI Express SSD available for the Mac Pro, but we'd take this with a pinch of salt, although the good news is that the Mercury Accelsior is a driverless solution both in OS X and in Windows.
OWC offers the Mercury Accelsior in four different sizes, 120, 240, 480 and 960GB with the first two models sporting the SandForce SF-2281 controller and the two larger capacity models sporting the SF2282 controller. In terms of performance, OWC has rated all four models at up to 100K IOPS for 4K random reads and writes, but in terms of sequential speeds the fastest SKU is the 480GB one which offers read speeds of up to 780MB/s and write speeds of up to 763MB/s. The 960GB SKU is for some reason the slowest out of the lot with read speeds of 756MB/s and write speeds of 673MB/s – unless the write speed is a typo by OWC.Price wise the Mercury Accelsior doesn't come cheap, starting at US$399.00 for the 120GB SKU, going to US$549.99, US$979.99 and US$2,179.99 for the 240, 480 and 960GB SKUs. That said, OWC has already “discounted” the 120GB SKU to US$359.99, with the 480GB SKU coming in at US$929.99 and finally the 960GB SKU at US$2,095.99. The 240GB SKU won't arrive until next month some time, but is again already reduced to US$529.99, so much for MSRP's.Source: OWC
Read more: OWC launches the Mercury Accelsior PCI Express SSD for Mac by VR-Zone.com
OWC launches the Mercury Accelsior PCI Express SSD for Mac
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