OWC Mercury Electra 6G vs. 6G Extreme Pro SSD Question

[FluJunkie]

So I'm debating between equipping something like the Sonnet Tempo card with an SSD from OWC - my current boot drive is from them, and I'm quite pleased with it.

My question is between the less expensive Mercury Electra vs. Extreme Pro. Leaving aside the longer warranty on the Pro, the primary difference seems to be the handling of Incompressible Data, wherein the Pro is vastly faster.

It mentions things like certain photography and video file formats, but I'm not a photo/video person. The use of this would probably be as a screaming fast boot and application drive - possibly as a scratch disk for some scientific computing that has an I/O bound step in it, but those would be either text or binary files.

Does the Pro represent a meaningful speed boost for me, or is the Electra suited for what I'm looking to do?

 

[MatthewAMEL]

They are completely different drives.

The standard Electra has a SF-2281, 'standard' MLC NAND, and 7% over-provisioning.

The Electra Pro has a SF-2582, eMLC NAND (more stringent binning), and 28% OP.

If you aren't sure you need the Pro, then you probably don't.

 

[FluJunkie]

They are completely different drives.

The standard Electra has a SF-2281, 'standard' MLC NAND, and 7% over-provisioning.

The Electra Pro has a SF-2582, eMLC NAND (more stringent binning), and 28% OP.

If you aren't sure you need the Pro, then you probably don't.

One could do some education, and outline what those differences actually manifest.

The reason I'm asking is that my workloads generally aren't things that get advertised as "This is great for X!", so it's hard to tell at times.

 

[MatthewAMEL]

'enterprise' class SSDs, typically give you higher price with lower capacity but higher and more consistent performance (over the life of the drive).

Great for applications that require a lot of random i/o (web servers, SQL servers). Bit of an overkill for general use computing.

 

[FluJunkie]

'enterprise' class SSDs, typically give you higher price with lower capacity but higher and more consistent performance (over the life of the drive).

Great for applications that require a lot of random i/o (web servers, SQL servers). Bit of an overkill for general use computing.

That was my guess, but occasionally I get surprised by things (like really, really needing ECC RAM).