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  Hard drives based on flash memory are still a few years away from becoming mainstream products, because flash memory drives are still much more expensive per gigabyte than conventional hard drives—and even if they were cost-competitive, flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) cannot satisfy worldwide demand. However, there are more and more flash SSD products that are serious hard drives alternatives—at least for enthusiasts. We looked at six new drives from Chaintech, Memory Corp, Silicon Power, Soliware, and Super Talent. Good SSDs, Bad SSDs Even if the supply right now seems to be large, flash SSDs still are a curiosity found at the very low end (think of entry-level notepads with 8 to 32 GB of low-cost storage) or at the high end. Enthusiast notebooks such as Lenovo’s X300 ultra portable utilize 1.8” Samsung SLC flash SSDs. Apart from that, the volumes being sold are still rather pathetic; after all, how many people are willing to spend several hundred dollars on a 32-64 GB drive? In addition to the substantial price points for flash SSDs, hard drives have gotten really cheap. Terabyte hard drives are well below $150, and you can get 500 GB drives for as little as $75. And there are additional advantages for the good old hard drives. They have proven to be more reliable than many flash SSD products. Customers, such as a large OEM we won't mention, have been trying to validate flash SSDs for enterprise applications by looping hardcore I/O loads, and they all failed with write errors after only a few months. But there are also very positive examples in the desktop and mobile space, as Intel and Samsung were able to show us last year. Although the current products are even more expensive than the majority of flash SSD products on the market, they are worth the money if you’re out for maximum performance and efficiency. Many Brands, Few Winners We received six new flash SSD products that all store either 32 or 64 GB. Some of the brands—such as Memory Corp or Soliware—might be new to many users. Silicon Power and Chaintech have been around for a while; Super Talent is probably the best known vendor out of these five. Most of these drives show excellent characteristics, but we found that this isn’t the case across all tests. Let’s have a look.

• Super Talent’s 64 GB SATA 2.5” SSD is the last drive in this review. We already looked at the MasterDrive MX; this time the sample is called MasterDrive OX, and both are based on MLC flash memory. The MasterDrive OX is also available as an external version and at up to 256 GB, which we believe might be unaffordable at this time. It provides nice access time and interface throughput of up to 176 MB/s, which is definitely sufficient. The vendor states 150 MB/s read and 100 MB/s write speed, which, again, we could not reproduce. We reached 110 MB/s sequential read throughput and up to 53 MB/s writes on our storage test system. Insufficient Performance While the throughput is nice, the other benchmarks show insufficient performance for the MasterDrive OX. The 0.3 ms access time is nice, but it does not translate into quick I/O performance: 30 workstation I/Os per second is a really bad result that any conventional hard drive can beat. The same applies to our fileserver, database and workstation IOmeter test patterns: the drive does not provide convincing performance except in the webserver benchmark, where only a few kilobytes are requested for each I/O operation. Insufficient Efficiency The power consumption during DVD playback is average at 1.4 W, but that’s not where we’d expect it. The same applies to the PCMark05 application benchmarks and our efficiency tests, where we check performance per watt for streaming reads and for workstation I/O. The streaming read performance is nice, but efficiency is spoiled by the drive’s high average power consumption of 2.6 W for this workload. It does even worse at the workstation workload, due to slow performance and high power consumption.

• The last drive in this roundup is Super Talent’s UltraDrive GX (MLC), based once more on the practically-ubiquitous Indilinx controller. Obviously, this is the firm’s performance product. Super Talent offers both SLC and MLC flash models. We received the latter at 128GB capacity, although there also are 64GB and 256GB options. Higher capacity models are rated for higher performance. Our drive didn’t reach the specified 260 MB/s throughput, but it delivered strong throughput and PCMark Vantage application results. At the same time, power consumption numbers were better than average, making the GX strong on performance per watt both for streaming and I/O operations. Setting I/O performance aside, Super Talent manages to deliver slightly more than other SSDs based on the same Indilinx controller. The vendor also offers a garbage collection tool, called Performance Refresh Tool, on its Web site. Super Talent’s long list of firmware updates demonstrates how much progress is going on in the SSD arena. See more products Super Talent UltraDrive ME 32GB Solid... Newegg.com $119.00 SuperMediaStore.com $179.99