Mass marketing methods come to SSDs

Newly introduced and available for pre-availability orders, the privately branded 2.5-inch SSDs from established Apple Mac component vendor OWC (Other World Computing) are a sign of the rapidly changing SSD landscape with respect to mass marketing of solid-state drives to end users. The Mercury Extreme Pro series of SSDs range in capacity from 50 to 480 Gbytes and they physically look pretty much like every other SSD out there (milled, blue-anodized aluminum cases notwithstanding). These drives are based on SandForce’s SF-1500 SF-1200 controller chip and what’s significant about the introduction of these drives is that OWC is passing through a significant chunk of SandForce’s technology and terminology but reframing that information and passing some if it along at a less technical level. In other words, OWC has substantially transformed SandForce’s tech speak features through words and pictures into important benefits easily understood by end users. This mass marketing approach opens a new front in the SSD wars.

First, OWC offers two versions of the Mercury Extreme Pro SSD. There’s an RE version (RE stands for RAID-ready enhanced) and a non-RE version. The RE versions have capacities of 50 to 400 Gbytes and cost $230 to $1600. The non-RE versions have capacities of 60 to 480 Gbytes and cost $220 to $1580. OWC’s marketing materials make it very clear that the difference between these drives is SSD controller firmware and that the RAID enhancements are based on SandForce’s RAISE (redundant array of independent silicon elements) technology. RAISE, one component of SandForce’s so-called DuraClass technology, distributes data across the various NAND Flash chips within the SSD using RAID-like algorithms. SandForce claims that this technique coupled with extended ECC algorithms reduces the chance of read errors by 100x. OWC highlights quotes from the SF-1500 data sheet to bring the complexity level of the claim down a notch or three and to push a benefit that’s easily understood by client-level users:

“Best in class error correction (ECC) and SandForce RAISE™ (Redundant Array of Independent Silicon Elements) technology provides RAID like data protection and reliability without loss of transfer speed due to parity.”
Another fascinating facet of the differentiation between the RE and non-RE versions of OWC’s Mercury Extreme Pro is the explicit discussion of capacity overprovisioning. The non-RE SSDs are 7% overprovisioned and the RE versions are 28% overprovisioned, which partially helps to explain the difference in drive capacities and the different warranty periods (3 years for the non-RE drives versus 5 years for the RE drives).

However, the convincer for most client-level SSD buyers isn’t going to be all the text claims. It’s more likely to be the marketing graph OWC has posted that shows how the write speed of Mercury Extreme Pro SSDs doesn’t degrade over time as do unnamed “competitive” SSDs. Here’s the graph:


Who in their right mind would pick an SSD that rapidly approaches a zero Mbytes/sec write throughput as shown in the graph above? No one, that’s who. Yet this is clearly a “marketing” graph, lacking numeric scales for both the X and Y axes. Even without numbers however, you have to admit that the graph does its job.

OWC has also posted a boot video similar to the one we blogged earlier (See “Corsair Video vividly shows SSD speedup on laptop”) but for a MacBook Pro booting up with SSD assistance instead of a PC. Videos like these from Corsair and OWC make it tangibly clear why an end user would want in SSD in their laptop of PC. They're selling the sizzle, not speeds and feeds.

These ongoing changes in the way SSDs are marketed point toward the beginning of a maturation in the SSD market. As SSD prices continue to fall and as capacities continue to rise, SSDs become increasingly attractive to a larger number of end users, and changes in the way SSDs are marketed to these prospects reflect that evolution.