By The Numbers: What Can An OWC 6G SSD Do For Your 2011 Mac mini?

But if you’re into audio editing, video editing, or doing anything else that reads and writes large amounts (or several small amounts) of data – there’s just no substitute for a SATA Revision 3.0 capable SSD such as the OWC Mercury EXTREME 6G SSD. The speeds are well over twice as fast [as Apple’s SSD] boasting 506MB/s read speeds and 432MB/s write speeds from a single drive!

Then we tested two OWC Mercury EXTREME 6G SSD in a RAID 0 configuration (on the server model of Mac mini – again we’re looking into how to get a second hard drive into the consumer model, but that will be another blog post down the road after we figure it all out) we got Thunderbolt-saturating speeds averaging 995MB/s and 994MB/s for read and write speeds respectively.

When I put a Mercury EXTREME 3G into my MacBook, cold boot times were reduced from a minute thirty to just 25 seconds — reboots are even faster. OWC knows their stuff, and their USA grade solid state drives are impressive as always. With the Mac Mini, they found they could achieve more than 10x the speed of a conventional hard drive, and over 4x the speed over Apple’s SSD with their setups. Regardless of whether you choose Apple’s or OWC’s Mercury EXTREME 6G SSDs, the performance boost over a traditional hard drive is stunning.