Jack of Too Many Trades

I bought this Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini SSD enclosure with my own money, an open box special from Other World Computing (OWC, also known as MacSales.com), back in October 2018. It’s moved around the house many times, and apparently I repurposed the USB-C cable for it at some point.

But now as I’m trying to get my iMac (Late 2015) fully usable without touching the 5400rpm SATA drive inside the system, I realized I have a couple of flea market SSDs and a use for this enclosure. I was pondering ways to use two or four large SATA SSDs, either repurposing my Drobo Mini, buying a Thunderbolt 2 enclosure, or something altogether different.

Then I saw the Mercury Elite Pro box sitting in a stack in the wood cubby near the fireplace. I got it out, realized what was missing, spent half an hour finding the right A-to-C cable for my iMac, and installed the SSDs in it.

The observations

I tested with some 960GB SSDs I’ve had for a while, PNY CS1311 (mentioned below), and got about 380MB/sec write, 348MB/sec read with Blackmagicdesign Speed Test using the USB-C/Thunderbolt port on my Macbook Pro M2 Pro, 5GB test file setting.

Using the Micron 5100s, I got 402MB/sec write and 423MB/sec read on my iMac. On my Macbook Pro M2 Pro, I got similar results. But the Macbook Pro showed an unexpected advantage.

The Elite Pro Dual Mini supports USB Power Delivery, in lieu of the cannon-type 12V 3A AC adapter. Unplugging the power adapter and plugging in the USB-C 20gbps cable alone gave me good results and one fewer cable to mess with.

The device advertises itself as supporting 10Gbps USB, and up to 738MB/sec i/o with RAID-0, but that’s likely to be limited by the drives themselves.

At some point this year I plan to replace the iMac with something more modern, with at least Thunderbolt 3 and a separate monitor, But for now, getting nearly full USB 3 speeds (those speeds were megaBYTES, not megabits) will be more than enough. And I’m probably limited by more standard performance SSDs on top of that.

What’s the summary?

The Other World Computing Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini Portable 2.5″ drive enclosure is a pretty useful way to put a pair of 2.5″ drives to use on almost any modernish computer.

It is currently available for $75 diskless at Amazon or OWC, available preloaded with up to 16TB of SSD or 4TB of HDD at OWC.

You’ll be limited by the USB port speed on the computer, and the performance of the SSDs themselves, of course. From a standard USB-A connection to your older PC or Mac (or NAS) up to a bus-powered Thunderbolt / USB-C port on a more recent Ultrabook or Mac Mini/Studio/laptop, you have a way to get an extra 16TB of high-performance storage into your compute environment without much effort or expense (aside from the drives themselves).

I have an old pair of PNY CS1311 960GB SSDs that I bought to use in a previous iMac using an Addonics Snap-in 25 RAID (2×2.5 to 3.5″ RAID) enclosure. The SSDs are harder to find, and apparently Addonics has gone out of business so those Snap-In RAID units are nearly impossible, but you might find a similar enclosure if you want an internal SSD boost.

You can find pretty good deals for ~1.92TB SSDs, like Patriot Burst Elite for $103, Acer SA100 for $105, Lexar NQ100 QLC for $110, Lexar 2TB NS100 TLC for $114).

If you want to go overboard, I picked up a pair of Micron 5100 ECO 3.84TB SATA drives at an unrepeatable price (probably), but you can find them for the low $200s on eBay.

Is that not enough? Watch for 7.68TB or 8TB drives, although those are pretty expensive. And maybe some of the huge Nimbus Data SSDs will come up for sale someday.

Sources Detail

I bought the Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini Portable on an open-box promo from Other World Computing, and the SSDs at various times, out of my own pocket. As I write this post, OWC still offers open box (when available) at the same $58.75 price I spent in 2018.

No company mentioned has reviewed, endorsed, or even been made aware of this post (as far as I know). 

This post contains Amazon Affiliate Program and eBay Partner Program links. If you buy through the links above, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

All prices listed are as of the time of writing (April 27, 2024) and are obviously subject to change.