Once inside, the circuit board is held to the bottom cover with small plastic clips. The case comes apart after removing four Phillips head screws around the four edges of the top cover and wedging a fingernail in to slightly pop the metal clips around the perimeter. The OWC Mercury Aura Pro is pretty simple to take apart, although we don’t recommend it since it does void your warranty.

The list of these ultra-mobile devices is getting longer we fully expect to see more 1.8″ drives in response to the demand. The slim model uses the 1.8″ standard so the drive requires less height and width in the palmrest. For example, the slimmer cousin of the Lenovo ThinkPad T410 which we recently reviewed, is called the ThinkPad T410s. These drives are primarily aimed at netbooks, ultra-portable notebooks and tablets. The primary sticker lists all the drive’s important information, including revision number of the shipping firmware.įor those of you who might wonder why this drive looks smaller than usual, the Aura Pro is a 1.8-inch SSD with a condensed SATA power and data connector.

Moving past the exterior color, the drive features stickers on the top and bottom cover. If you order one right now, the Aura Pro units now come with the regular blue paint. While some of you might want to grab the pitchforks and scream false advertising, they actually have a good explanation, ours is silver only because it came from an early run. While normally OWC SSDs have blue cases, our Aura Pro is oddly silver.

Chip Based Data Encryption: 128-bit AES-compliant.

Unrecoverable Read Errors: Less than 1 sector per 10 16 bits read.

ECC Recovery: Up to 24 bytes correctable per 512-byte sector.

Native Command Queuing up to 32 commands.

NAND: Tier 1/Grade A Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND Flash Memory.

Sustained Sequential Write: up to 275MB/s.

Sustained Sequential Read: up to 285MB/s.

Controller: SandForce SF-1200 Series 7% Over Provisioning firmware set.

Our review drive is the 120GB capacity, but OWC offers an entire spread including 60GB, 240GB and a 480GB SSD “coming soon.” The Aura Pro delivers the familiar SF-1200 performance of sustained reads up to 285MB/s and reads up to 275MB/s. OWC certainly had portability in mind when designing the Aura Pro, but they didn’t skimp either in terms of stated performance or capacity, the two areas small form factor drives often get shorted. This means that portable devices like netbooks, tablets and ultra-portable notebooks have a new high-performance option when it comes to internal storage. OWC’s Mercury Aura Pro SSD is one of the few 1.8″ performance-based SSDs on the market designed to meet this need. Bigger isn’t always better, and in the world of SSDs smaller and specialized form factors are becoming more popular and look to shake up the way we think about storage in portable devices.

Owc aura ssd offer