OWC Mercury Accelsior 480GB PCI-E Solid State Drive Review

System Overview & Testing Procedures
Getting the drive installed in your system is quite easy.  Just plug it into any open PCI-E slot and power on your system.  What’s great about this drive is no drivers are needed on either PC or Mac!  Once the drive is in just turn on your PC and you are good to go.  After the drive is formatted it has a total capacity of 446GB.

info2

Using the Info tab in HD Tune Pro we can see that the Mercury Accelsior supports NCQ and TRIM.

info1

For testing the drive we will be using the following benchmarking programs, we have provided links to each so you can run the benchmarks as well.

HDTune Pro (download)
ATTO Disk Benchmark (download)
CrystalDiskMark 64bit (download)
AS SSD Benchmark (download)
Anvil Storage Utility Professional (download)

We also made these optimization changes…
– No power saving options in the BIOS
– ACHI enabled in the BIOS
– Windows 7 User Account Control (UAC) is disabled
– Windows 7 power saving settings are disabled

Normally we would compare this drive to other drives, but since it is the only PCI-E drive we have taken a look at in about a year it is not relevant to compare it to older drives.

About Author