Related articles

• Conclusion: Recommending Samsung

  Having looked at 14 flash SSD products, we found that the market can currently be segmented into three different sections, which can or cannot be recommended, depending on your budget and requirements: 1. High Performance The flash SSDs based on single-level cell (SLC) flash by MemoRight and Mtron belong to this category. The two manufacturers build drives that are designed to deliver the best performance, regardless of other characteristics. MemoRight dominates the I/O benchmark section, which is important for servers, while Mtron’s Pro 7500 series is an excellent flash SSD for workstations. None of them are particularly efficient, and all are very expensive at $1,000 and up for only 32 GB. 2. Consumer / Mainstream Most of the flash SSDs in our roundup have to go in this category, including Crucial, Hama, Silicon Power and Super Talent. Most of these drives are based on multi-level cell (MLC) flash and most are also, I’m sorry to say, not really that special. Crucial and Super Talent offer amazing read throughput. Silicon Power actually ships capacities of up to 128 GB, but its performance disappointed. The advantages of a consumer SSD over a conventional hard drives are there, but they aren’t as impressive as we’d like to see. We’d only go for such a product if the price were exceptional; everyone else should stick with their magnetic hard drives a little longer. 3. Premium Consumer This category currently holds only a single drive: the Samsung 64 GB SSD SATA-2, which is also available from OCZ as the 64 GB SATAII SSD. For those who want it all — high performance and high efficiency — this product is it. No other SATA-based flash SSD shows such low power requirements in idle and when active, and no other flash SSD provides balanced performance across all benchmarks. We hope that more flash SSD products will follow in this category, because only these drives are worth the cost. Samsung’s 64 GB SSD SATA-2 and the OCZ 64 GB SATAII SSD receive the Best of Tom’s award in the hard drive category.

• 14-Way SSD Hard Drive Roundup

  July was an interesting month. Although there were no new major flash SSD product releases, we talked quite a bit about the successor to the hard drive, or what it will eventually become, and decided to keep looking at the flash SSD market. Today, an SSD isn’t necessarily the better choice over a magnetic hard drive, as there is a catch with most of the options out there. Some flash SSDs are much more efficient than hard drives, others are much faster than hard drives, and only a small minority can achieve both. But all are more expensive, especially when you consider cost per gigabyte. The Flash SSD Market: Between SLC and MLC We should keep in mind that the flash SSD market is still relatively young, and in the process of being defined. Manufacturers such as MemoRight and Mtron position their products for high-end workstations and servers, while Samsung has an excellent consumer drive, which it does not yet in retail. Instead, it provided small quantities to other vendors such as OCZ to create their individual products. All the premium products are based on Single-Level Cell (SLC) flash memory. You can identify these by their high write performance and I/O performance. And then there is the flash SSD mainstream, although we’re having a hard time declaring this a “mainstream” segment when it still averages several hundred dollars per drive. The mainstream differs from the high-end in its utilization of Multi-Level Cell (MLC) flash products. These can be read quickly, but their write and random access performance generally lag behind. Manufacturers typically don’t tell you whether they use SLC or MLC flash, but you can tell by the cost. If the price tag hits four digits, you’re looking at a high-end product based on SLC flash. Don’t make the mistake of declaring MLC the loser, though, since good products using it can certainly be suitable even for high-end desktop applications. New Products: Hama, Mtron, Samsung, Silicon Power As you would expect, the market for these products is in constant flux. We included two new 2.5” flash SSD in between our initial flash SSD Hoax article and our update on specific findings regarding efficiency. Although we had to return some drives to their sources, we added four new flash SSD units from the European vendor Hama, a 128 GB drive by Silicon Power, a new high-performance model by Mtron and Samsung’s latest offering. And we found that only one product manages to stick out from the crowd.

• Super Talent Masterdrive MX 60 GB 2.5”: Unbalanced

  This drive’s attributes are already well-known, as we looked at it in our last flash SSD analysis. We really like that Super Talent spent some time to find a decent product name that people can actually remember. All the other drives are simply called “flash SSD”, which doesn’t help to separate the wheat from the chaff. This one seems to offer good bang for the buck, although it cannot beat the premium drives from MemoRight, Mtron, OCZ and Samsung. The Masterdrive MX is an MLC-based flash SSD designed for desktop or notebook applications. It can read at almost 110 MB/s, delivering great performance for desktop users, but it writes at a slow 30 MB/s. The 60 GB capacity is somewhat unusual, but a tribute to the MLC flash memory. The 0.5 ms access time can be considered slow for flash SSDs, but this is in line with the I/O performance: it is superior to a conventional hard drive, but isn’t exciting when compared to other flash SSDs. The idle and peak power requirements of 1.2 W and 2.2 W aren’t special when compared to 1.0 W and less idle for Hama, MemoRight, OCZ and Samsung, and down to 0.8 W peak for OCZ and Samsung. This drive still provides better efficiency than an average conventional hard drive, but you should not get it in an attempt to improve battery life on your notebook, as you probably will never see that.