OWC Mercury Helios PCIe Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis Review – Imagine 800MB/s and 150,000 IOPS

OWC MERCURY HELIOS ON THE NEW MACBOOK AIR (2012 REV)

You might notice that the Mercury Helios seems to fit right in on our desktop beside the MBA.  Connection to the MBA is via Thunderbolt and our first test was to confirm that the Helios did, in fact, power on and off with the system which it did.

Quite logically, there would be no reason that one couldn’t boot from a second OS on the Helios to the MBA.  When purchased, the Helios ships with the unit and power assembly and the Thunderbolt cable is not included, much the same as we still don’t see HDMI cables shipping with newer televisions.  They are simply too expensive to keep pricing down, the cable used in this case priced at $59.99.

A moment to complain, if I may because I sincerely started digging to find a Thunderbolt cable at an affordable price and it just couldn’t be done.  I can get a Thunderbolt to HDMI or Thunderbolt to Display Port for under $20 at Amazon but finding a straight Thunderbolt cable anywhere near that price was not possible.

For our Mac world testing, we used Disk Speed Test by Black MagicDesign and, for the first time, discovered that SATA 3 was possible on a Mac through an external device.

Although both read and write performance are SATA 3, we would have liked to see better write performance coming from the Mercury Accelsior via Helios.  The advantage we had, in this situation, is that we can conduct separate testing outside of the Mac environment and with separate PCIe devices to determine whether the performance is PCIe, Helios or even Thunderbolt related.  After all, we have not tested an external cable even pushing 629MB/s prior to this little experiment.