With half the capacity of the 100GB Vertex LE we looked at last week, OWC's 50GB Mercury Extreme shows that while there is a performance drop with SandForce's SF-1500 50GB platform it is limited strictly to small file random write speed. Even with the performance drop, the drive is no slower than Intel's X25-M G2. And in sequential write performance it's still significantly faster.
As I mentioned in my Vertex LE review, the SandForce controller used in this drive is still largely unproven. OWC does offer a 5 year warranty on the drive, so presumably you'll be covered if something should happen to it - I would just recommend backing up regularly.
OWC Mercury Extreme 50GB SSD with SandForce controller gets benched
Posted on Sunday, February 28 2010 @ 20:19 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
AnandTech received a sample of a 50GB OCW Mercury Extreme SSD, this model features a SandForce controller and ships for $229.99. You can read the article over here, here's a snip from the conclusion: