OWC Mercury Elite Pro mini USB-C
An affordable pocket hard drive
$44.99 (about £41) caddy only, $94 (about £86) 1TB, $119 (about £110) 2TB FROM OWC, owc.com FEATURES Thunderbolt 3 compatibility, up to 540MB/sec transfer speeds, USB-C 3.2 or USB-A
The Mercury Elite Pro mini uses a spinning drive rather than a solid state drive and is thus much more affordable, while still offering performance that will be perfectly adequate for a good many people. Extremely lightweight, it is nonetheless very well built and comes with a USB-C cable plus USB-A adaptor from which it also draws its power.
It’s plug-and-play and compatible with more or less anything from computers to gaming consoles, as well as being bootable and Time Machine ready. The HDD versions come in 1TB or 2TB capacities at 5400rpm or 7200rpm respectively, and SSD versions are also available, though at a higher price. OWC’s claim of 540MB/sec performance was more or less borne out by our tests, which came in slightly under that but not by much. In use you’d be hard pressed to tell it’s a spinning drive, since even under load it was silent and didn’t seem to get warm. Dragging and dropping movie files was really quick, with a 3.5GB file copying over in under 10 seconds.
This drive balances price and performance. It’s not as fast as an SSD but it’s more affordable and perfectly fast enough for backups, movies, gaming and working with all but the highest bit rate digital videos. Hollin Jones