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BARE FEATS LAB - real world Mac speed tests

Mercury Accelsior Pro Q: 2000 Megabytes at 2000 Megabytes/sec

May 23rd, 2017, by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist

Other World Computing has a new Mercury Accelsior PCIe storage product called the "Pro Q." We benchmarked it on the 2010 Mac Pro tower against the previous Mercury Accelsior_E2.

GRAPH LEGEND
Pro Q Slot 2 - Mercury Accelsior Pro Q 2TB PCIe Solid State Drive in x16 slot #2 of 2010 Mac Pro
Pro Q Slot 3 - Mercury Accelsior Pro Q 2TB PCIe Solid State Drive in x4 slot #3 of 2010 Mac Pro
E2*2 Slot 3+4 - Dual Mercury Accelsior_E2 PCIe Solid State Drives in x4 slots 3 and 4 of the 2010 Mac Pro
E2 Slot 3 - Single Mercury Accelsior_E2 PCIe Solid State Drive in x4 slot 3 of the 2010 Mac Pro

LARGE SEQUENTIAL
We used AJA System Test to benchmark file level sequential transfer speed using a 16GB test file (and 4K frame size).

HIGHER number in megabytes per second = FASTEST

small random
Quickbench's Standard Test includes random transfer test sizes from 4 KBytes to 1024 KBytes. The graph shows an average of 5 test cycles. Not as impressive as large sequential transfers, but reveals performance you can expect from certain applications which do small random transfers.
HIGHER number in megabytes per second = FASTEST

WHAT DID WE LEARN?
A single Accelsior Pro Q is much faster than a single Accelsior_E2 when doing large sequential transfers. It's even faster than a striped pair of E2s. And a single Pro Q has twice the storage capacity of top 960GB Accelsior_E2 model.

It is true that there are faster PCIe flash storage PCIe carrier cards sold by other companies, but even if you locate and purchase the scarce AHCI blades to populate them, the total cost of the solution is double that of the Pro Q.

There are solid state drives with higher capacity, but they transfer large sequential data at a fraction of the speed of the Pro Q.

You might say the Pro Q hits the 'sweet spot' of PCIe flash storage.

There are a few caveats.

  • You can NOT use the Pro Q as a boot volume. That's due to the fact that the LSI controller requires a special driver.
  • You must install a power feed. OWC provides the cable and instructions on how to connect it to the PCIe inlet fan's power port using a "T."

CONCLUSION
If you need a fast flash based storage for your pro projects, you should seriously consider the OWC Mercury Accelsior Pro Q.


NOTE: Besides enhancing your Mac Pro tower, you can also use the Accelsior Pro Q with any Mac that supports Thunderbolt by installing it in the OWC Mercury Helios.

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WHERE TO BUY THE OWC Mercury Accelsior Pro Q
Order direct from MacSales.com.

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copyright 2017 Rob Art Morgan
"BARE facts on Macintosh speed FEATS"
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