New Fast OCZ, SuperTalent SSD Drives

OCZ and Super Talent have both announced new availability of high-performance solid state drives this week, proving that there's no stopping the SSD trend.

As CES 2009 quickly approaches, SSD manufactures seem to be rushing to get their high-performance and high-capacity SSDs ready for the event. In the last few months, several manufactures announced new SSDs featuring sequential read speeds of over 200 MB/sec. and memory capacities reaching 256 GB. Not to be left out in the rain however, OCZ and Super Talent have announced this week their own premium SSDs, offering excellent performance and large capacities.

With its announcement, OCZ introduced a new series of premium SSDs, entitled the Vertex series. The Vertex series is offered in capacities ranging from 30 to 250 GB, with maximum sequential read and write speeds of 200 MB/s and 160 MB/s, respectively. Although the Vertex series offers relatively fast performance, the new drives are MLC-based, which is a less expensive and yet slower alternative to SLC-based SSDs.

OCZ could likely have achieved greater speed with its new SSDs if they were SLC-based, but in so doing it might have priced the drives out of reach for the average consumer. Since the new Vertex series is meant to offer premium performance, as OCZ already offers mid- and entry-range SSDs, OCZ has gone another route to ensure that the new Vertex series is of particular premium performance.  The Vertex series includes up to a 64 MB on-board cache, which OCZ claims to help offer " faster transfers and superior overall system response times in a broad range of applications and games." The 30 GB and 60 GB Vertex SSDs only come with a 32 MB cache, however. 

As for Super Talent, it has announced two new series of SSDs; the enterprise-class, SLC-based, UltraDrive LE series and the premium consumer-grade, MLC-based, UltraDrive ME series. The new SLC-based drives feature maximum read and write speeds of 230 MB/s and 170 MB/s, respectively, while the new MLC-based offerings have read and write speeds of 200 MB/s and 160 MB/s, respectively.  Just like OCZ, Super Talent opted to make its consumer level SSDs MLC-based, although there does not seem to be any mention of on-board cache.

The UltraDrive ME series comes in capacities of up to 256 GB, while the UltraDrive LE series comes in capacities up to 128 GB.  Super Talent expects availability for the new drives in January, which would be just in time for CES.  Pricing of the new Super Talent drives are not yet available, but as for the the new OCZ Vertex drives, they have MSRPs of $129, $249, $469 and $869 for the 30 GB, 60 GB, 120 GB and 250 GB sizes, respectively.

Please find below a chart for comparison of a select few premium SSDs, along with their manufacture's rated read and write speeds.