OWC Mercury Electra MAX 3G 960GB SSD Review – Imagine a 1TB SSD in Your Notebook!

REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

To say that I had to pry this out of the hands of OWC would be an understatement, to put it mildly.  To even try and make a sale for this SSD with respect to performance, considering what you could do with two 512GB SATA 3 SSDs in RAID 0, would be just crazy.  The Electra MAX 960 GB SSD is NOT a SATA 3 SSD and the best we can hope for performance is that it maintains decent SATA 2 speeds, and that it does.  There is a thought process that we need to focus on though.

This is a 1TB SSD and it will fit in any notebook on the market, including the MacBook Pro, and provide that much needed capacity that has been sought for so long.  To not consider the value that a 1TB SSD holds to so many media professionals would be careless and kudos has to go to OWC for finally pulling this off, a 1TB SSD that will be just as much at home in a Mac as it will in a PC. In fact, this has to be the only typical form factor 1TB SSD that I know of right now that is available and can be purchased.

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Last but not least, the composition of the Electra MAX still amazes me because, at a time when everyone believes we will be seeing higher capacity with the more compact 19/20nm memory, OWC pulls this off with 25nm MLC memory, and at a total of 32 x 32GB chips.  It wasn’t a month and a half ago that I spoke with one of the worlds top technology company executives and he stated that production of the 1TB consumer SSD just wasn’t cost effective and may never be.  Kudos OWC! Once again, you have earned our Innovation Award!

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9 comments

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    $1100 based solely it’s size…can’t be performance, it’s sub par at best. I just don’t see this one selling very well. ~$1 a gig for sata2 performance with even slower 4ks…never could I pull that trigger.

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    Awesome about time some one made a large capacity SSD drive for laptop and ultrabook users. we need capacity NOW! Ill be buying this. sure sata3 would be great but sata 2 is good enough for now. besides who is going to match that capacity and speed for less. not many if any at that price.

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    I need the space but I am almost getting those speeds with a much cheaper spinner.

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      Where can I get both speed and capacity besides the OWC Mercury Electra? Not ready for a new laptop at this time. I do heavy video and photo editing. Thank you!

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        The OWC is still a rarity when it comes to high capacity in a SATA 2 drive. I’ve got an Intel Series 320, which I like, but its maximum capacity is 600GB. Intel has a few SATA 3 800GB drives now, but they’re outside the consumer range and command a higher price/GB.

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    Don’t like the idea of usind SATA II with SSDs.

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    I bought this drive about 2 months ago because the hard drive failed in my mid 2009 MacBook with 8G — I had upgraded that when I bought it to a 1TB 5400 drive a few years ago. I figured I would give it a try and spend the $1K on the drive rather than a new MacBook. All I can say is it has made my MBP 3-5 times faster in everything and something that I could certainly use for the next 3 years. It was well worth it to me even if it is not the speediest SSD out there. Hope this helps…

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    I have experienced a down clocking of the 6G OWC SSD to 1.5G instead of 3G in my MBP 2009, as it does support up to 3G. Do any of you have such an experience with other brands like crucial M550, etc, given that OWC SSD is almost 50-60 euros more expensive? OWC is the only SSD producer in the market that has kept producing 3G SSDs.

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