OWC Mercury Electra 6G 2TB SATA SSD Review
OWC's Mercury Electra 6G SATA SSD reaches a new 2TB capacity. Join us as we take a close look at what it has to offer.
Recently we had the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G in the lab to explore the performance of the latest iteration. Many of you know OWC continuously updates its lineup, and the latest run of 2.5" solutions drive sees both controller changes along with the NAND.
In the latest update, the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G was moved to the Phison S12. Today's drive, the Mercury Electra 6G, has moved to the Silicon Motion 2259, a four-channel controller offering connectivity via SATA 6Gb/s. Performance is rated at 522 MB/s read and 494 MB/s write. The MSRP of the 2TB OWC Mercury Electra 6G comes in at $338.99 with a three-year warranty.
More often than not, you will find OWC 2.5" solutions coming in cardboard retainers, as seen above. This was true with the Extreme 6G as well as the Electra 6G.
The drive itself comes complete with a blue colorway and sticker on top for model identification.
The backside goes into further detail with the model and capacity listed on the sticker.
Opening up the drive, we have the SMI2259 in the middle with Micron DRAM to the right. Down below, we have four packages of NAND flash.
CDM is a staple in performance testing; version 7 has seen some updates in the workloads used for testing. Sequential performance comes in at 549 MB/s read and 477 MB/s write while 4KQ1 reaches 36.3 MB/s read and 97 MB/s write.
ATTO is yet another popular benchmark for storage performance that breaks down performance based on file size. In this scenario, we see consistent performance from the Electra 64K through 64M.
Moving to PCMark10, the Electra does quite well with a score of 865. This puts it just above the MX500 from Crucial.
Full System Drive showed similar performance once again with a score of 821.
Price/Performance of the Electra 6G isn't terrible coming in at 97%, still near the bottom of our charts.
While the Mercury Electra 6G is the entry-level solution to OWC's 2.5" portfolio, the build quality is certainly on par with any other 2.5" drive. The increase in capacity to 2TB is a plus, and features like TCG Opal add to the package.
In use, the drive had no issues in our testing and performed up to expectations reaching 549 MB/s read and 477 MB/s write in CDM. In ATTO, we found a rather consistent drive doing 525/460 from 64K through 64M. Moving into PCMark10, the quick system test produced a score of 865 putting it ahead of solutions like the MX500.
Pricing is rather tough for the 2TB Electra 6G. With its MSRP at $338.99, it's $100 cheaper than the Extreme 6G, but once we get into the market, it's nearly $150 more expensive than solutions like the WD Blue, MX500, and Barracuda 120 in the same 2TB capacity.
Tyler's Test System Specifications
- Motherboard: ASUS Crosshair VIII Formula X570 (buy from Amazon)
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (buy from Amazon)
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB 2x8GB DDR4 3600 (buy from Amazon)
- Cooler: Corsair Hydro H60 (buy from Amazon)
- Case: Corsair Carbide 275R (buy from Amazon)
- OS Storage: Corsair MP600 1TB (buy from Amazon)
- Power Supply: Corsair RM850x (buy from Amazon)
- OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)
Performance | 80% |
Quality | 85% |
Features | 80% |
Value | 60% |
Overall | 76% |
The Bottom Line
The Mercury Electra 6G carries ample performance and is perfectly fit to be a secondary drive in a tiered setup. However, its current market price is well above the competition.
