Specifications, Pricing and Availability

Other World Computing does a really good job publishing their product specifications and gives us a lot of information. Under ideal circumstances the OWC Electra is capable of delivering 556MB/s read speed and 523MB/s write speed. In being able to run your drive at this level of performance, you'll need a motherboard with native SATA III capability. We suggest an Intel P67 or Z68 chipset.

OWC also lists the speed in which you can expect when working with incompressible data, a specification that we don't see advertised too often. The Electra is able to read 208MB/s and write 235MB/s when working with incompressible data, but the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G goes up to 479MB/s read and 282MB/s write.

The differences don't stop there between these two OWC drives. The Electra that we are reviewing today is blessed with a three year warranty, but the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G has the longest warranty on the market at a full five years. Neither drive ships with a desktop adapter bracket which is a bit of a bummer for PC desktop users.

Most OWC drives are sold on their own website, macsales.com. This makes it easy for us to get pricing information, but we don't get the same e-tail competition price reductions like we see with other manufactures. A good example is the current Tiger Direct vs. Newegg price war going on with SSDs as each company tries to out do the other.