IT News Head Lines (AnandTech) 4/20/2012

OWC Releases Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD

OWC has released their first PCIe SSD, the Mercury Accelsior. OWC has used SandForce controllers throughout its history in the SSD world and the Accelsior is no exception. It is equipped with two SandForce SF-228X controllers, which are the same controllers that can be found inside OWC's other SATA 6Gb/s SSDs.
The actual design is pretty interesting. OWC has opted to build the SSD out of two blades, each with their own controller and NAND running. The blades run in RAID 0 by default but they can also be configured in RAID 1 mode. Oftentimes everything is intergrated on one PCB but OWC's approach is different, and there is actually a big advantage todoing things this way. Using blades allows the capacity to be upgraded without buying a totally new card. OWC does not sell the blades separately yet, but manufacturing new blades should be somwhat cheaper than manufacturing the whole PCB, so down the road this could result in a lower total upgrade price.

OWC Mercury Accelsior Specifications
Capacity	120GB	240GB	480GB	960GB
Controller	Dual SandForce SF-2281		Dual SandForce SF-2282
NAND	24nm Toshiba Toggle-Mode MLC NAND
Interface	PCI Express 2.0 x2
Form Factor	Low Profile PCI Express
Sequential Read	758MB/s	762MB/s	780MB/s	756MB/s
Sequential Write	743MB/s	763MB/s	763MB/s	673MB/s
4K Random Read	Up to 100K IOPS
4K Random Write	Up to 100K IOPS
Price	$360	$530	$930	$2096
Warranty	3 years

OWC's Mercury Accelsior is actually a very competitive drive. A quick look at NewEgg shows that OCZ's RevoDrive 3 is not significantly cheaper--in fact, it's more expensive at 480GB and above. OCZ does claim better performance but it's good to keep in mind these figures meant for advertising.
OWC is primarily an Apple focused company and here is the big deal: Mercury Accelsior supports booting under OS X. There are plenty of PCIe SSDs out there but OWC's is the first one that supports booting into OS X. No drivers are needed in OS X or Windows either--the drive is plug and play. Booting into Windows has not been a problem but it's understandable that a Mac user has little need for a PCIe SSD that only boots into Windows. Unfortunately Mac Pro is the only Mac that has empty PCIe slots and Apple has not shown much love for the Mac Pro lately.
Availability for the Mercury Accelsior line starts now, though only the linked prices above are currently showing up online.


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