OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD now offers 4TB capacity

Mac upgrade specialist OWC has introduced a 4TB version of the Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD, a high-performance drive for Mac and PC that claims to offer consistent reading and writing speeds over its entire range.

The Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD is a universal-fit drive that works in any system accepting 2.5-inch SATA SSDs. This means it can be used as a replacement drive for older MacBooks, desktop Macs like the Mac Pro, and other notebooks and PCs.

Aimed at audio and video editing and production, as well as photography industries, OWC claims the drive excels at providing sustained performance. Read and write speeds exceeding 500MB/s are reported across all of a drive's capacity, instead of experiencing slowness when it starts to fill up with data. The drive's peak reading speed is 559MB/s, while writing tops out at 527MB/s.

The drive uses a combination of DuraWrite and RAISE technologies, as well as Tier 1 NAND flash, which is touted to offer high levels of data reliability, integrity, and longevity. Overprovisioning by 7% enables there to be headroom for data management, enabling both high performance and reliability levels.

OWC also offers a five-year limited warranty for the drive, along with live support.

The range is offered in capacities from 240 gigabytes, priced at $79.75, rising to 480GB for $119.75, and 1 terabyte for $219.75. A 2 terabyte drive costs $429.75, while the highest capacity at 4 terabytes is priced at $899.75.

Mac models capable of an upgrade with the SSD include the non-Retina MacBook Pro (Mid-2012 and earlier, all sizes), MacBook (Mid-2010 and earlier), Mac mini (Late 2014 and earlier), Mac Pro (2019, 2012 and earlier), and the iMac (2019 and earlier).

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23 Comments

rob53 3255 comments · 13 Years

About 3 years ago

It’s amazing how far SSD speeds have come because 6G is actually slow except when comparing it to HDD turtle speeds. NVMe is a minimum of 4X faster but you need a newer motherboard with newer PCIe buses to achieve it. I’ve put OWC SSDs into MacBooks and iMacs and they make a huge difference. Just this change makes older Macs usable again. If you can easily open you Mac to replace the drive it’s the best couple hundred dollar fix you can do.

maciekskontakt 1168 comments · 15 Years

How about comparing it to Inland Professional for half price almost the same speed sustained?

Mike Wuerthele 6840 comments · 8 Years

maciekskontakt said:

How about comparing it to Inland Professional for half price almost the same speed sustained?

I have an Inland Professional SATA drive, and it in no way sustains the claimed OWC speeds when the writes start piling up. Obviously, I don't have one of the new OWC drives, though.

andyring 54 comments · 10 Years

What? Is this a 5-year-old repurposed article? Yeah, they're good drives but grossly overpriced. A Crucial 2TB SSD runs $199 with the same specs, or virtually the same specs. OWC's is $429.

In the last 5-6 years at work, we've used OWCs drives and ones from Crucial, Samsung, Kingston and others. Honestly, the non-OWC ones have been both cheaper AND more reliable.

GeorgeBMac 11421 comments · 8 Years

I was under the impression that Mac drives (at least SSDs) had firmware that 3rd party drives could not duplicate (so the machine would lose some level of functionality) -- and that Apple could refuse work on a machine modified by the user?

Is that false?

Or does it only apply to SSDs?

Or is it maybe technically true but of little importance?

Or is it a serious consideration?