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

Final Thoughts
When I had first heard about this product I was really surprised that it was coming from OWC.  I mean when you think of solid state drives OWC is not the first name you think of, but after our review of the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G solid state drive and this review they really should be!  As I said this one of only a few PCI-E solid state drives available for purchase currently.

We have seen other PCI-E solid state drives before, but never one that gave you the ability to upgrade the storage.  The way the Mercury Accelsior is designed it has two detachable mPCI-E “blade” drives.  Since these drives are detachable that means you can easily upgrade the total storage capacity of the drive and if a drive were to fail you can replace it.

Another thing that sets this drive apart from other PCI-E solid state drives is the fact that it is plug and play compatible with both PC and Mac.  It was so nice being able to plug the drive into an open PCI-E slot, start my system and be good to go.  No time wasted installing drivers or messing around in the BIOS.

Features aside, one thing that we always gauge products on is performance.  So how did the Mercury Accelsior perform?  It definitely performs much faster than all of the solid state drives we have reviewed this year because it is not held back by the SATA III bottleneck.  In ATTO we saw scores of 809MB/s read and 801MB/s write!  That is very impressive and the Accelsior is one of the fastest drives of all time that we have tested.

Right now the 480GB version of the Accelsior is selling for $764.99 directly from OWC.  At that price it does put it far above many current SATA III solid state drives, but you are not going to see the speed this drive offers in those drives.  For that reason ThinkComputers awards the OWC Mercury Accelsior 480GB PCI-E Solid State Drive a 9 out of 10 score.

rating9 10 small

Pros:
– Extremely fast!
– Both PC and Mac plug and play compatible
– Interchangeable mPCI-E “blade” drives
– One of the only PCI-E SSD’s available

Cons:
– Price puts it out of the reach for most

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