Tuesday, September 30th 2008
Super Talent Begins Shipping Affordable 64GB and 128GB SSDs Next Week
Evolution continues, flash storage solutions and DRAM memory modules manufacturer Super Talent today launched a pair of new high quality SATA-II SSDs. Solid state drives have become legendary for their many advantages over hard drives, but still can't take the market share they deserve because of their high retail prices. The new MasterDrive LX SSDs, offered in 64GB and 128GB capacities, combine all the advantages the solid state technology can offer but also appeal with an attractive price. The Super Talent MasterDrive LX 64GB model will retail for about $179, while the 128GB unit is expected to retail for under $300. Unfortunately performance scores are little lower. Using SATA 3Gbps interface both drives will offer sequential read speeds of up to 100 MB/sec, and sequential write speeds of up to 40 MB/sec. Both models will begin shipping this week, backed with Super Talent's 1-year warranty.
Source:
Super Talent
14 Comments on Super Talent Begins Shipping Affordable 64GB and 128GB SSDs Next Week
The draw back with SSDs at the moment is the write speed really, but that'll improve with better revisions. If you're interested, Anandtech have a good article on the Samsung and OCZ SSDs.
I have a 60GB MLC SSD and also 2x "V-raps uberalles" and I would have say that the raptors perform much better for the gaming/web browsing that I do. Nope. These SSDs wouldnt be anygood for an os drive. The random small file write time is way too slow on these drives. Remember that when windows is loading, its reading and writing a bunch of small bits of data in random places on the drive....like reading configuration files and updating log files. These SSDs cant erase small bits of data like a normal hard drive can, it has to erase the entire data page and rewrite it with the modified data(most SSDs have a 4KB sector size compared to a hard disk drive with a 512-byte sector size; then factor in that hard drives normally have 8 or 16MB cache where most SSDs only have 16kB of cache). So there is too much overhead when the OS is modifying small files that are randomly stored across the drive.
If you want a SSD for an OS drive pay $600 and get one of the 80GB intel drives.
Hopefully windows 7 has better support for these drives; I think these would be best used as a readonly cache drive for quick data access. Like just used for files that are never modified and just small enough to benefit from the zero access times.
IMO SSDs are only good for increasing the e-penis.
It's coming....
That's why HDD prices are falling like a stone.