OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Testing – HD Tune Pro
HDTune Pro is one of the most popular hard drive software suites available. It has many different benchmarks and tests built into it.  Keep in mind it is a single-threaded application though.  Our first test is the read benchmark, which tests the average read speed and access time of the drive.

hdtune read

hdtune read graph

The drive performed great averaging 382MB/s, at that speed it kept up with most of the other drives we tested.  Up next is the write benchmark.

hdtune write

hdtune write graph

Again good performance here averaging 325.7MB/s, but it was behind most of the drives we tested.

Now we have the Random Access test.  This test measures the performance of random read and write operations. Tests are taken in 512b, 4KB, 64KB, 1MB, and random file sizes. The performance of the drive is reported in operations a second (IOPS), average access time and average speed. Here are both the results from the read and write random access tests.

hdtune io read

hdtune io write

We normally like to see over 5,000 IOPS for the 4K test here.  As you can see it really beat that mark in the write test.

In HD Tune Pro 5.0 the file benchmark is actually 2 tests now.  The first is the normal file benchmark we are used to see that tests different transfer speeds over specific file lengths.

hdtune file1

The newly added file benchmark also tests a file size (500MB for our test) and gives you sequential read and write speeds.  It also gives you IOPS for 4KB random single and 4K random multi.

hdtune file2

HD Tune also has a set of extra tests.  Here are the results of those for both read and write.

hdtune tests1

hdtune tests2

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