The OWC/MacSales Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini Enclosure is a dual 2.5 inch HDD/SSD diskless enclosure with a 10Gbps USB-C connection and hardware RAID 0. You also have a choice of RAID 1, Span and Independent Drive modes.
It looks good, seems well built, is bit large unfortunately because the design has the two SSDs / HDDs side by side instead of stacked. It comes with USB-C and USB-A cables and power supply in a well packaged box. It's easy to open it and insert your own drives.
As far as speed is concerned though, I couldn't get nowhere near the advertised speed of 980MB/s.
I fitted the Mercury with two Crucial MX300 1TB SSDs, and selected RAID 0 on the enclosure, plugged the power supply and pushed the Set button. It quickly gave me an array of 2TB that I formatted Mac OS Extended Journaled with Disk Utility.
The best speed I could get was around 370MB/s connected to Thunderbolt 3 of a Mac Mini M1:
Rather disappointing. I also tried Apple software RAID 0 again for a total array of 2TB with Independent Drive mode selected on the Mercury and got the same results:
With the SSDs as single 1TB drives, not RAID, I actually got the same speed on each individual SSD. Meaning there is absolutely no speed advantage in having a RAID 0 array with this enclosure:
That's too bad. The same dual Crucial MX300 1TB set on a Sonnet TSATA6 PCIe Card fitted into a classic MacPro gets around 700MB/s:
Now maybe I got a lemon, maybe it's possible that fitted with OWC's own SSDs the enclosure is capable of the advertised speed. I don't know and I am not interested by this configuration. As a 0GB, add your own drives enclosure, fitted with 1TB Crucial MX300s, it does not keep its speed promises, so I will be returning it.
What's your experience with this piece of equipment? Leave your comments below.
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