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OWC launches 480GB SandForce-based SSD

Published on 13th May 2010 by Gareth Halfacree

Other World Computing's latest SSD features a SandForce controller and a whopping 480GB capacity.

If you were impressed by Mushkin's SandForce-based entry into the SSD marketplace announced yesterday but wish it was just that little bit more capacious, fret not: Other World Computing is here with a whopping 480GB SSD.

Announced to press by the company yesterday, the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro series of SSDs feature the same controller as used in the Mushkin drives, a SandForce SF-1200 capable of ripping data from the drive at a rate of 285MB/s. Where the drives differ, however, is in maximum capacity.

While the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro series will start at 60GB and work its way through 120GB and 240GB, the range tops out at a quite frankly incredible 480GB - one of the largest SSDs currently on the market.

All the drives include integral 128-bit AES encryption to keep your data safe and secure, along with SandForce's DuraClass technology designed to offer best-in-class endurance and reliability - meaning that your data shouldn't be going missing any time soon.

Before you get too excited, however, there's the little matter of price: currently available exclusively in the US, the top-end 480GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro is going to set you back $1,579.99 (around £1,070). While that might seem breath-takingly expensive, it represents an overall cost of $3.29 per gig - not too much of a premium over rival Mushkin's 240GB model at $3.06 per gig.

The company's entire range is available from its online store now.

Does the idea of a 480GB SSD answer your hopes and dreams for the technology, or does the price per gigabyte need to drop drastically before you'll be tempted away from your spinning platters? Share your thoughts over in the forums.

20 Comments

Discuss in the forums Reply

Mraedis 13th May 2010, 10:38

What's the fastest setup you can get with RAID'ing ultra-fast regular HDD's?

Omnituens 13th May 2010, 11:11

I think the read speed on that Black Dwarf was over 200MB/sec, RAID5, 8 drives.

Pete J 13th May 2010, 11:23

£1070? Ha ha ha ha ha! I'm sorry but there's no justification for that unless you are part of the ultra, ultra leet computing crowd.

When SSD prices drop by a factor of ten, THEN it'll be worth it.

barndoor101 13th May 2010, 11:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pete J
£1070? Ha ha ha ha ha! I'm sorry but there's no justification for that unless you are part of the ultra, ultra leet computing crowd.

When SSD prices drop by a factor of ten, THEN it'll be worth it.

how much did you just spend on graphics cards pete? :|

Pete J 13th May 2010, 11:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by barndoor101
how much did you just spend on graphics cards pete? :|

That's different !

Seriously though, I imagine a large capacity high cost SSD will only be used by very specialist applications (and this is where people tell me this is what the company's aiming for) such as computer simulations involving lots of small file transfers.

It'd just be nice to see SSDs come down to a sensible price :( .

barndoor101 13th May 2010, 12:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pete J
That's different !

Seriously though, I imagine a large capacity high cost SSD will only be used by very specialist applications (and this is where people tell me this is what the company's aiming for) such as computer simulations involving lots of small file transfers.

It'd just be nice to see SSDs come down to a sensible price :( .

well you could argue that 3xGTX480s is a specialist setup for specialist apps (CUDA etc).

and anyway, if you look at the price/storage ratio its similar to 'consumer' drives.

ev1lm1nd666 13th May 2010, 12:28

If i win the lottery, I'll have two! one for my pc and one for my laptop but until then i can dream

Scootiep 13th May 2010, 13:22

Jesus God, at that price tag, it doesn't seem like much of a jump to just get a PCI-E SSD drive like: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227499. For only $300 more you're getting nearly triple the access speeds and another 32 gigs.

WildThing 13th May 2010, 14:00

I'm very happy with my newly acquired X-25M G2, so no need for an upgrade just yet. :D It is however good to see more manufacturers jumping on the SSD bandwagon.

LAGMonkey 13th May 2010, 14:29

I have an application for it. But its best summed up with two words..

Rainbow Tables.

But i certainly dont have that much cash laying about! :(

fata1_666 13th May 2010, 15:12

I've been looking at these cards (http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductID=1211017&source=froogle) for some time and at £1410 there still expensive but when there reaching half that price I will take the plunge into ssds if its worth doing do it properly. having a direct link into the motherboard has surely got to better than going through the sata controller, with Read 800MB/s, Write 750MB/s that's impressive.

supermonkey 13th May 2010, 15:14

Looks pretty cool, and I'm not overly fussed about the price tag. New technology is always expensive, but it always comes down as the manufacturing and implementation mature.

Just look at the IBM 3380. In 1980 it offered a whopping 1GB capacity, weighed over 500 pounds, and cost $40,000.

KayDat 13th May 2010, 16:23

I look forward to the day when we can count SSD capacity value in terms of number of GB per dollar, as opposed to dollar per GB.

MrGumby 13th May 2010, 18:42

We gonna see a new ssd labs test soon? Seems like quite a few new drives have been released recently. Wouldnt mind a review of Crucials C300 drives.

l3v1ck 13th May 2010, 19:49

Like you said on the podcast, we want fast SSD's at about the 100GB mark for a boot drive. For mass storage HDD's are much better value.

13eightyfour 13th May 2010, 19:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by

Id happily grab one if it was around £500, but that not happening anytime soon.

leexgx 14th May 2010, 02:23

having high data rate does not mean it be faster, access times that makes SSDs work very fast (data rate is just an side affect of flash chips why faster Sata 600 SSDs are more targeted for server use) does not matter how many HDDs you add access time be the same or worse

mafj 14th May 2010, 06:30

well, SSDs gives so much a boost in real life apps on your PC: e.g.
browsing pictures (generating thumbnails) is 5x faster
zip works 50% faster
searching through sources 40x faster
mercurial, git works 3 times faster
various builds 3 times faster
not mentioning overall lightness of the system, where you save seconds here and there

If SSD is going to save you several hours a week, and you are a consultant paid 100 quid for an hour, why not ask your company to buy one for you? It will be paid off in a month.

barndoor101 14th May 2010, 08:59

i just installed an intel 160gb SSD - it has made the single most difference to the speed and responsiveness of my system. i dont have to wait for things anymore, and every other pc feels slow now.

leexgx 14th May 2010, 18:41

that's what happened when i got my first gen SSD (Corsair S128) data rate was slower then an HDD but the access times more then made up for it, system was nice and fast (as long as big read and write was not going on) now i have an M225 and i now have Trim support and 150MB/s+ speeds and i have to say that has improved stuff more so Read and Writeing at the same time it handles it with no problems, as my S128 was Quite bad doing that it would stall (go a lot slow) an little bit some times (but no stuttering like the JMicron drives), Opera is good e.g. on my system on SSD it limited by my cpu speed when loading tabs with the HDD i was limited by the HDD speed

SSD is the single best thing you could buy you want an fully responsive pc, most users who comment SSDs not worth it are mostly likely never owned one or an good SSD

HDD do bog the system down Vista was extremely bad on some unoptimised hdds i found Hitachi/IBM (or raptors or RAID 0 norm drives) was the best hdds to use for vista as they had very good random access data rates for some reason, but i never use them due to the deathstars, RAID 0 with vista i would recommend on all gameing systems

but windows 7, 1 disk will work quite well as they sorted out the I/O task priority in it
any Crap that windows is doing on the HDD is suspended when user or norm programs are using the disk they also fixed systemrestore/trustedinstaller/shadowcopy from tieing the system up for 10 mins with lots of disk I/O that makes a lot of disk trashing(my orange dongle takes 1-2mins to install on vista some times, on windows 7 less then 20 seconds)