Super Talent is stepping up its SSD game with the UltraDrive series.
With solid state drives (SSDs) constantly coming down in price and thus becoming more popular, the two primary concerns for many consumers are size and speed. Super Talent is certainly addressing the latter with its brand new line of UltraDrive SSDs.
The UltraDrive series has two different families of drives: UltraDrive ME (MLC) and UltraDrive LE (SLC). The ME drives offer read and write speeds of 200 MB/sec. and 150 MB/sec. If those numbers won't cut the mustard for you, the LE series bumps performance up a notch, with read and write speeds of 230-and-170 MB/sec., respectively. As for I/O performance, SuperTalent's internal numbers put sequential read and write IOPS for both the LE and ME families at over 16,000 IOPS and 13,000 IOPS. Random read and write IOPS are over 7500 and 6000 IOPS each. When compared to SuperTalent's older MasterDrive series, these new UltraDrives certainly have an advantage in performance. The UltraDrive ME series has a 17 percent boost in read speed and a 23 percent jump in write speeds when compared to MasterDrive PX SSDs.
While these new UltraDrives are the fastest SSDs Super Talent has to offer, are they at a price point that's acceptable for most consumers? Unfortunately, the 256 GB version of the UltraDrive ME is going for a staggering $645, and the 128 GB version is $379. Keep in mind that these are ME drives, which means a 128 GB UltraDrive LE will likely go for significantly more than $400. Compare that to a 300 GB Velociraptor from Western Digital that goes for $230, and which would you choose for your desktop? While there may not be any consumer 10,000 rpm drives for notebooks, spending $400 on a notebook SSD is a lofty expense.
All of the UltraDrive are in the 2.5-inch form factor, SATA II drives. The ME series comes in 32, 64, 128 and 256 GB flavors, and all four come with a two year warranty. The more premium LE drives come in 32, 64 and 128 GB sizes, and carry three years of coverage.
